‘Venus at Home’ is a solo
touring museum exhibition by visual artist Usha Seejarim. Venus at Home is
currently on exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), where the
exhibition opened on 10 February 2013.
Venus at Home is an
intensely personal project in which Seejarim aimed to explore the places she
finds herself in and the various roles she undertakes, such as being a
home-maker, housewife, mother of two, and an artist. These distinctly defined roles in Seejarim’s
own life come together in this body of work that employs ordinary household
objects and found objects as the primary materials to create a series of
sculptural works and installations.
Venus at Home explores Seejarim’s interest in and her allurement with
the mundane and everyday routines. Her
use of ordinary objects as material for art making inevitably references the
‘readymade’ stimulating questions around notions of exhibition and the definition
of ‘art’.
Seejarim is a young woman of
Indian descent whose own experience is as a South African. Yet her artistic
voice has been developed and informed by the rich heritage of her South African
diasporic Indian environment and culture. She asks relevant questions about
identity, nationality, culture and the concept of ‘home’- but rather than seek
universal clichés that society so often uses in rhetoric, Seejarim looks to
this project for a personal expression and questioning of these notions.
In a community that is
largely art-illiterate, conceptual art of this nature is strangely an immediate
abnormality. It also provided an access point to the individuals who
contributed objects drawn from family members and neighbours. The materials
utilised in ‘Venus at Home’ range from used mops, brooms and irons, donated by
these individuals. They have been curious about how their donations were
transformed, and equally Seejarim was equally curious about their responses to
the artworks; particularly since she suspected that they were expecting
something “pretty”.
Each object is culturally
loaded, gender specific and stripped of its utilitarian function when
transformed into these art pieces. She links their transformation to an acute
awareness of her identity through location, history and culture. It questions a
sense of who she is in relation to notions of home and belonging. This new body
of work extends Seejarim’s previous preoccupation with the ‘ordinary’ and
explores her position to the various persona and roles she undertakes - those
of an Indian/ South African woman, a wife, a mother, home keeper and artist.
Seejarim obtained her Masters Degree in Fine Art at Wits
University in 2008 and her B.Tech Degree in Fine Art in 1999 at the University
of Johannesburg (previously the Technikon Witwatersrand). She has held five
solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions nationally and
internationally in Paris, Minneapolis, Tokyo, Havana and Belgium.
Venus at Home was launched at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival on 28 June 2012. It was selected by the visual arts jury to be shown on the prestigious Main 2012 Visual Arts Programme.
Venus at Home was launched at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival on 28 June 2012. It was selected by the visual arts jury to be shown on the prestigious Main 2012 Visual Arts Programme.
The exhibition closes on 12 May 2013. Visit JAG before this thought provoking show
comes to an end!
