4A tells stories of the diaspora by highlighting community resilience
Amrit Gill walks into a Fitzroy cafe in a red and white checkered maxi dress. I am waiting for her in a black and white polka maxi dress. We smile and hug, but all I can really think at this point is: How can patterns be so parallel? They come close, but they never meet.
Art is funnily surreal. We often think a photograph is speaking to us even though it’s still, taken in a past moment, impossible to recreate exactly. I wonder, then, how curators seek stories - especially those never told before - in an attempt to put them together carefully, hoping they’ll find a place again.
Amrit sits across from me and looks at my third cup of coffee, hopefully knowing fully well I have too many questions for her.
Amrit Gill is the new and the first-ever South Asian Artistic Director at Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, where she was once a volunteer. As someone who doesn’t see a diverse representation of South Asians in the Australian art space, I ask her what it means to be the first of ideally many to come.
Dilpreet and Amrit in Melbourne
“I do think it was a deliberate choice to appoint someone from a broader Asian perspective. 4A has supported and represented a lot of South Asian artists over the years, but we're not as well known in the community,” says Amrit. “What I really want to achieve is to embed who we are more within the community, so people can actually see themselves in the space - especially with the queer South Asian community gaining more resilience and momentum.”
As a Punjabi-Australian, she has lived in multiple identities and is particular about who gets to tell a story.
For the Centre’s 2022 Program, Amrit is curating Bush Diwan, a show about the forgotten history of the Sikh community in Australia. Bush Diwan focuses on the story of Siva Singh, an early 20th century Benalla resident who, after voting in three federal elections, was struck off the electoral roll under the White Australia policy. He fought for decades for equal rights, and became a civil rights campaigner. In 1920, Sikhs from southern Australia came to his farm in Benalla for the first Australian reading of the Akhand Path, a day-long prayer ceremony for Sikhs.
The show will have four artists - Manisha Anjali, Anindita Banerjee, Amardeep Shergill and Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa - exploring the reclamation of identity by revisiting two significant yet little known moments in the country’s history.
“People are really interested in the story because they don’t know anything about it. The community has not written this piece of history; it has been written by people closely aligned with the community, but they are not Sikh, and they are not Punjabi,” says Amrit.
But, curating Bush Diwan wasn’t easy for Amrit.
“An elderly white man once confronted me with how the community won’t accept our take on the show, and I said, “I am the community”. The community has to have an opportunity to tell this story. And it's not a story owned by anyone else but us.”
Bush Diwan is on show at Benalla Art Gallery in Victoria from 5 August to 16 October, before touring to other venues across Australia. Meanwhile, at 4A, Amrit’s second show as a curator, Bollywouldn’t, goes live with TextaQueen on 22 October
TextaQueen is a queer, disabled, non-binary Goan Indian and has been using the fibre-tip marker to draw out complex politics of gender, race, sexuality and identity in detailed portraiture for over twenty years. They were also awarded the inaugural Copyright Agency Partnerships $80,000 commission with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Their show, Bollywouldn’t, is a catchphrase decolonised. It deconstructs all the "-isms" in the Bollywood genre, giving agency back to South Asians, particularly those marginalised within cultures through sexuality and gender identities. Bollywood dominates South Asia’s pop culture, but perhaps the liberation we seek lives in the spaces it wouldn't touch.
Amrit’s first day at 4A | Supplied
As I listen to Amrit’s vision for 4A, packed with larger-scale shows, I am transported back to all the times I haven’t felt welcomed in an art space. Every time I wouldn’t understand the meaning behind a painting, it’d take a hit on my self-esteem. Am I not good enough to know what the artist wanted to say?
I ask Amrit about how she plans on creating a greater community engagement, and she is quick to say: “by reaching out!”
I like that.
“We want to make sure however we're presenting a show that has multiple entry points. It's important to reach out to the community and also encourage the artists to have a conversation with the audience, which is very different from what I learned at art school,” says Amrit, jokingly adding, “Back then, it was like, “Audience? Who?”.
Gulping down my fourth coffee, I notice we’ve only talked about work. I want to ask Amrit about who she is when she is not just the CEO of 4A. How does she take care of herself?
“Wow, I honestly don’t often think about that, I should,” she says with a smile. “I am very lucky to have a close-knit team and be able to say I am not doing well on the days that I am not. Everything is in balance. I choose my work. You don’t always get that.”
Amrit and I walk out of the cafe, with our checks and polkas flying into Melbourne’s light wind. Two Punjabi women deeply connected with the creative world, but both also worlds apart.
I think that’s what telling untold stories do, they bring together the mismatched, the forgotten and the lost.
Art is a start.
Check out 4A’s 2022 Exhibition Program here.
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