Suitcase Aesthetics: The Making of Memory in Diaspora Art in Britain in the Later 1980s

Abstract

This essay explores the making of memory in two artworks dating from the later 1980s. Chila Kumari Burman’s Convenience Not Love (1986–87) and Zarina Bhimji’s She Loved to Breathe – Pure Silence (1987) are among many artworks by diaspora artists that imagine and reinvent individual, familial and collective memory, and in which autobiography connects to wider histories of voluntary and forced migration through which diverse South Asian communities arrived in post-war Britain. The essays draws on Sarat Maharaj's incisive analysis of migrant experience of dislocation and separation and the makings of a new life in a country in which elaborates a ‘suitcase language or system of representation’ to investigate what he called the ‘Art in Britain of the Immigrations’. This essay explores a ‘suitcase aesthetics’ to consider artistic investigations of dislocation and relocation, transit and settlement, crossing borders and questions of belonging. The suitcase suggests an aesthetic form of assembly, characteristic of diaspora art in the 1980s. In this art of collection and recollection images, objects, words, relics, remnants and traces are packed tightly together, 'pressed, strapped and squeezed in' as Maharaj suggests. Other works briefly considered include Sutapa Biswas's Infestations of the Aorta – Shrine to A Distant Relative, 1989, and the exhibition Intimate Distance at the Photographer's Gallery in 1989. The closing section reflects on the role of living memory in writing about art produced and first exhibited some thirty years ago, and the mnemonic lives of art works