Peripheral Lament - Collage + Poems + 12 track album
Peripheral Lament is a multiform project comprising a series of collages based on archival film stills, poems, and 12 track album recorded in collaboration with with multi-instrumentalist Hank Tree and US producer Kramer (Low, Daniel Johnstone, Galaxie 500). Collages from the project were one of fourteen works selected among hundreds s for exhibition at Exeter Contemporary Open 2024.
The mixed-media works are based on film stills from the 1940’s newsreel Indian News Parade, produced by the Indian government in the run-up to independence in response to more Anglo-centric newsreels created by British companies.
These images are layered with fragments from the Sushruta Samhita, an ancient Sanskrit text on medicine; as well as epistolary extracts from Thomas Macaulay, whose 1835 ‘Minute on Indian Education’ famously declared that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’ They are worked into by hand with red pigments, crushed pastels, and tape to evoke bloodstain and censorship, masking, as well as to dismantling and disrupting knowledge hierarchies.
The full album is forthcoming on digital, vinyl, and streaming platforms, and features field recordings, archival samples and distortion-heavy instrumentals.