Abdullah M. I. Syed, ‘Mapping Kala Pani’, 2024, mixed media installation.

@abdullahmisyed
@gallerysallydancuthbert
@wollongongartgallery
Exhibition: Dreams Nursed in Darkness
Curator: Claire Taylor
Artist portraits: @garrytrinhphotography
Studio: @parramattaartistsstudios – Granville
Special thanks for research visit: @powerhousemuseum

After almost two decades, putting down my blade knife to hold an ink/acrylic paint brush dipped in black in has been a revelation. Poetic activism just became more urgent, organic, futile, unforgiving and very personal. The literature, images, ideas, facts, truth, stories and my own imagination about KalaPani that I brought with me when I moved to Australia became clear to me in that pool of black ink and seeped onto a paper with marks of urgency. Art became gestural.
An excerpt of my on going research paper on this idea forms this short statement.

Mapping Kala Pani’ is first installation of a series of artworks that investigates Australia being multiply-coded as ‘kala-pani.’ The literal translation of ‘kala-pani’ from many Indo-Aryan languages is ‘black water’ but it has a broad range of cultural associations that influence and produce meaning for diasporic identity, which my work maps. Superficially ‘kala-pani’ is analogous to referring to the prison in English as a black hole, and an act of mapping this would suggest interrogating Australia’s use of, and complicity in, black sites. This work has developed from my earlier poetic responses to the leaked files published in 2016 by the Guardian that revealed abuse of asylum seekers in Australia’s offshore immigration detention facilities. This broader body of work references the accounts as evidenced in the files of acts of self-harm, such as swallowing razor blades to protest the appalling conditions.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through @creative.australia Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, and is supported by the NSW Government through @creatensw
@abdullahmisyed