“Transient Temples”

The land I live and work on has a complicated, multilayered and highly contested socio-cultural footing. “Transient Temples” is a participatory installation in which I attempt to negotiate my identity in context to the complex histories of the land where I have built my new home. This work provoked by the materiality of land emerges from a profusion of personal and invisible forces, influenced by ontological dimensions of materialist and ethical aesthetics. In this chapter, I speak about “Transient Temples” as a contemporary participatory installation and how it channels my sense of home and migrant identity in context to the following questions. How do I negotiate my identity on the lands that have been scarred by colonisers? Does India’s colonial history guide my consciousness as I tread these lands? How does my migratory experience guide my practice as a contemporary visual artist in Australia? I shall engage with works of artists like Sharon Alward (n.d.) and Ruth Jones (2013) and consider them against my art practice in (re)constructing religious rituals. I shall establish the discussion around home, migration and identity as supported by discourses from Ahmed (2000), Bhabha (2010), and Papastergiadis (2013). This will be framed with nods to (new)materialism discussions by Barad (2003) and the embodied Eastern traditional knowledge systems and concepts of Indigenous epigenetic inheritance and worldview (Martin 2017). I relate the designing and working of the performance through my gendered subjectivity of being a migrant woman and then discuss the dual bearings of my identity production on the Indigenous land of Australia. The conclusion draws upon an attempt to overturn the general discourse of dis-placement and dis-location and change it to conscious attempts in location of an authentic connection with the shared consciousness of the land

Programming language · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions