Shamil Balram

We Never Speak Alone: Land, Labour, Material, 2024, Installation views

We Never Speak Alone: Land, Labour, Material. 

by Shamil Balram

In partial fulfillment of a Master of Art in Fine Arts

8 to 15 August

We Never Speak Alone: Land, Labour, Material, is an installation made up of sculpture, text, performance and sonic work. This work explores a range of languages, where material is not simply its physical composition. The various forms of materiality selected in this work are chosen for their conceptual, symbolic, and narratively located resonances. These resonances carry traces of sites and memories. Spaces and times that carry a tension of affect; often these are traces of painful memories or experiences, or poetic gestures towards the resilience of living through these hardships.

The work explores ideas of labour, orientation, memory, capitalism and more. These ideas are all important in terms of how they produce the groundwork for a possibility of experience that is often damned to be expendable. Yet even in this expendability, the work explores moments of affect and association that perhaps can master the forms of servitude as sustenance and life endures.

This exhibition aims to create a new exploratory space for black thought and to theorise different conceptual models for thinking beyond conventional notions of resistance through the use of material.

The work hopes to take us on a journey through the questions:

·       How does one's experience and relationship to objects create a form of knowledge and history? And

·       What is it about these objects that humans have created that also controls the conditions of human existence?

The work invites a de-familiarisation with the everyday and questions the affective and lived dimensions of systems and histories of labour. This work is coded around a politics of rethinking how black lived experiences are imagined as it questions the societal relations that are produced through these structures of labour.

The work and the masters that it forms part of examines our orientation and contests different practices of labour and knowledge that may remain inaccessible, exclusive, or even critiqued or perceived as irrelevant, both in the study of lived experience and the effects of emotions through a decolonial black studies framework.

In this pursuit, the exhibition deploys found objects that are machine made next to objects that are carefully handmade, all with deeply embodied narratives. The work proposes the land as a repository of memory, and employs the use of materials such as earth, plaster, stone, charcoal and more. These materials are in themselves explored for their properties of remembering, as they come to operate as a form of archive work. These materials importantly explore geographic connections and synchronicities within personal history and the forces of migration, labour, farming, and orientation.

Photography by Siyanda Marrengane