“Can I as a British woman be held accountable for the failings and atrocities committed by the empire my nation was responsible for?: “Each man carries within himself remnants of deep seated antecedents. the past plays tricks on us and conditions our present responses. floating around the psyche of each one of us are the fossil identities” K Holst Petersen and anna Rutherford.

I specialise in large scale watercolour and ink works which I produce from photographs I have taken in and around my ancestral home in rural Bangladesh. In researching this country that I call my home, the impact of the dissection of India by imperial Britain and the horrific effects of its short time as ‘east Pakistan’ made me question what having a shared history as both the oppressor and the oppressed have on my creative output.

As a mixed race artist inhabiting two distinct cultural backgrounds, I experience a feeling of displacement in both the opposing worlds I hail from. I began exploring these ideas of place and otherness that is imposed on the asian subcontinent by the West as well as questioning what my role as a child of both these worlds is. In this exploration I began reading the ideas of hybridity put forth by Homi k Bhabha in which he suggests third space as a means of understanding the relationship between the opposing spaces of the imperial west and post colonial east by a synthesis of the two causing me to question weather my work is a european representation of the Bangladeshi experience, or a Bangladeshi trying to communicate the experience or the post colonial legacy of eastern culture to a european spectator?: “The intervention of the Third space, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys the mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is continuously revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code”  Homi k Bhabha.

My emerging video and audio works began to develop side by side till they had organically  evolved to one piece of work, again in its most literal sense a personification of the hybridity I am trying to create a dialogue with. In my experimentation with video I had the challenge of how to better to articulate my ideas of hybridity through film. This was when, in trying to better order my own personal thoughts as to my heritage and what impact it has personally on my relationships and my ever-changing desire to both conform and rebel at each point, to both sides of my culture in audio files. Accidental mirroring of the audio track, lead to two displaced versions of myself, harmonising and jarring in turn. Turning this into a literal symbol of the duality and hybridity of my thought.”

liv_abdul@hotmail.co.uk