Closeness & Distance (2015), is a video work I made during a visit to Bombay near the completion of the PhD. It is a single channel video shown as a split screen projection. It is 2.30 minutes in duration. I conceived, developed, shot, and edited the artwork in India.
It highlights the significance of the spatial concepts of home as sites of belonging, both as lived experience and imagination, in relation to identity formation for Anglo Indians. The artwork engages the idea of nostalgia, drawing particularly on academics, Alzena D’Costa’s (2006), no relation, and Alison Blunt’s (2005) analyses and discussion of the legitimate and necessary role of nostalgia for the Anglo Indian community in determining a sense of self and a sense of place. It is within this nostalgic framework that I have considered my own diasporic condition and its influence on my art practice, and how the larger diaspora of Anglo Indians maintain a sense of identity through community in their adopted homelands by looking bifurcately backward and forward simultaneously.
In the video time passes slowly as a way to remember. Narrative is alluded to through the use of montage images from experiences of my home and the neighbourhood when I lived in India. The images move in and out of focus, they linger on forms, such as keys and doors from inside the apartment I was born. They use the device of a split screen as a way to activate and further fracture the act of remembering.