Winter 2024
“South Asian people form the largest visible minority group in Canada—however, given that only 6% of this population reside in Québec, and as a response to its ongoing invisibilization, many have come to describe this community as “invisible” [1]. As a queer artist who is a minority within this minority group, my artistic practice embodies for me a desire to situate myself within a larger South Asian diasporic tradition—the underrepresentation of which poses a significant challenge to those searching to access such knowledge. I come to Artexte with an eagerness to retrace part of this artistic lineage and bring to light the threads that relate my diasporic experience to queer South Asian histories and artistic practices that precede me.
I am starting this residency with the intent of producing an annotated thematic bibliography that maps out queer South Asian presence in Canadian contemporary art. I am particularly interested in the community of artists whose histories are connected to the 1970s wave of immigration. My vision is best echoed by the words of Gayatri Gopinath, who, on new possibilities derived from diasporic aesthetic practices disregarded by dominant history, describes queerness as a “conduit through which [we can] access the shadow spaces of the past and bring them into the frame of the present.” [2] At the core of my research is my fascination towards the ways in which self-representation for postcolonial migrants has functioned as an important tool of resistance to hegemonic culture which includes neoliberal formulations of queerness. What artistic methods and aesthetic languages emerge out of historical documents that chronicle the multiplicity of queer diasporic trajectories beyond their prosaic associations to dominant nation-states? In a context of globalization, how have the hopes and concerns of queer South Asian artists evolved over the decades outside of politics of representation? In what ways do our struggles for social justice align with the decolonial efforts of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island? And finally, how much of what has been conserved allow us to speculate further on the traditions and practices that exist beyond documentation?”
Naimah Amin is visual artist whose practice, rooted in their experiences as a Quebec-born Bangladeshi, reflects their curiosities on reconnection and the pursuit of belonging. Trained in painting and drawing, as they combine imagination with reproduction of archival material, the images they create become spaces where heritage coalesces into fictions that cut across familiar conceptions of borders and identities. Amin’s paintings and drawings are oftentimes extensions of their family’s photographic archive, the reinterpretation of which marks their evolving relationship with personal history and collective memory. In their more recent explorations, they pair paintings and drawings with found domestic objects that they then present within an installation context to emphasize the relationship between images and the material conditions from which they are born. Amin holds a BFA from Concordia University and is an upcoming MFA candidate at Emily Carr University of Arts + Design in Vancouver, BC.
[1] Mahsa Bakhshaei, et al. (eds.), The Invisible Community: Being South Asian in Quebec (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021).
[2] Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 9.