I Make Art

  

The installative video artwork I Make Art started in 2011 as a reaction to an unpleasant experience with a European curator and grew into a 21-video installation that concluded in 2020. How to make artwork and trying to engage the local and international fields of visual arts as a raced, sexed, class, nationalised, ethnic, religious body and the boxes and intersecting oppressions such bodies negotiate? The work relies on humour to mock these various categorisations while using popular culture references (Michael Jackson; Lady Gaga; Beyonce; Hear no Evil, See no Evil) alongside elitist Western fine art references. Khan plays with postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the ‘almost-but-not-quite’ slippage (in The Location of Culture) to speak about the ‘almost-but-not-white’ racial epidermalisation she struggled with and the ‘almost-but-not-right’ positionality she now purposefully and willfully (Sara Ahmed’s feminist notion in Willful Subjects) occupies as a South African Indian woman creative. 

Khan mimics American artist John Baldessari’s early conceptual video artwork I Am Making Art (1971) and in that failure, she harnesses the language of early conceptual artists (Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Cindy Sherman) to discuss failure and slippages as subversive languaging that hearkens to an avenging repetition that marks her postcolonial positionality. 

The work has been featured online on the Third Text website, in the online and print editions of the journal OnCurating. The work, as presented for this creative submission, was staged as part of the group exhibition A New World Order (2020), curated by Dr Johan Thom for the Turbine Art Fair. While the exhibition originally was supposed to be physical, Covid forced an online exhibition. The exhibition focused on academic scholars based at universities who maintain art careers and looks at their positions around decoloniality and postcolonialism. The move to an online platform resulted in the work being presented in a 3-D virtual rendering of an imagined installative space, where various elements came together (paintings, videos) in an ideal installation. In this, the work not only creates a dialogue with past conceptual art, but also with new technologies and how they can create idealised spaces (and are not contingent on just physical gallery spaces). It also allows physical work to be extended conceptually by new technologies to new audiences.

The links provided:

- I Make Art - Sharlene Khan website: this page features the I Make Art - A Declarative Statement videos done in 2020 that formed part of The New World Order group exhibition by Dr Johan Thom as part of the Turbine Art Fair that was forced into an online exhibition because of Covid.

- I Make Art - featured on the postcolonial online journal Third Text

- New World Order Curatorial Statement: Dr Johan Thom explains further his curatorial statement for the group exhibition 

- The RMB Turbine Art Fair announcing The New World Order group exhibition.

- Youtube: The RMB Youtube channel where Dr Johan Thom speaks about his curating of The New World Order

- I Make Art artist book