Bindi vora

On view: Copeland Gallery

Bindi Vora. Suture the detached pictures unravelling before us. From the series Unravelling, 2024

 © Bindi Vora / Commissioned by UAL Decolonising Institute and National Museums Northern Ireland

Collage, mark making and the appropriative use of image and text are the tools Bindi Vora uses to question how ideas of resistance and resilience are shaped by our surroundings, histories and lived experiences. The two projects on display both employ the use of found or archival images, an extensive collection of which Vora has procured over the last decade.

MOUNTAIN OF SALT

Mountain of Salt is an expansive series of 371 works comprised of found images, appropriated text and digital shape collages, initially conceptualised as a human response to the Covid-19 pandemic. As the country was plunged into lockdown, Vora began to collect fragments of text and spoken word from politicians, journalists or members of the public accrued across a range of sources—government briefings, Twitter commentary and even placards from the Black Lives Matter protests later in 2020. She combined these text fragments with archival photographs, and the resulting juxtapositions feel uncanny—familiar yet elusive, like a half-remembered dream. The rhetoric of collective responsibility, togetherness and unity espoused by those in positions of power is punctuated by platitudinal phrases, spurious claims, alienation and humour. The body of work, which was published as a book by Perimeter Editions (2023), speaks to the dissemination of language, its physical presence, and its effect upon us as individuals and communities.

UNRAVELLING

In an evolving new series Unravelling, and the site-specific wallpaper Expressions in your histories, overshadow my memory, is an attempt by Vora to locate herself in a culture where colonial systems have sought to flatten and simplify her heritage.


These works gently unravel Vora’s family history of migration traversing three continents, over the course of a century: her great-grandfather's departure from India in 1908 to settle in Kenya, during the construction of the East African railway by the British Empire; her grandfather’s relocation with his young family to Uganda, and their expulsion in 1972 under the dictatorship of Idi Amin, in which 90,000 Asians were exiled, and Vora’s parents’ marriage in the UK in 1984. By weaving together a multiplicity of histories through gouache, 24 carat gold and ink, along with collaged elements from 19th century postcards and archival family photographs, the works are finished with silhouettes of the artist in her formative years, acting as portals for Vora to imagine encounters with her ancestors. Vora elucidates a specific visual language to consider the interplay of archive and myth to unveil the complexities and tensions inherent in diasporic experiences.

Unravelling and Expressions in your histories, overshadow my memories (both 2024), have been commissioned by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute 20/20 programme x National Museums Northern Ireland.