The Broken is Broken
By Siqiao Liang
In March 2022, I was engaged in the colloquium Migration and Belonging at New York University Abu Dhabi with Professor George Jose. Throughout the sessions, I was able to participate in a panel as well as a visit to Language is Migrant led by the curators Anushka Rajendran and Natasha Ginwala. The theme of the exhibition and the artworks resonated with my memories of conducting fieldwork with refugee youths and illegal migrants a few years ago.
Untitled
Can absurdity blend with reality? When houses and trucks are sieged by rifles and bullets, when human life is intertwined with warships and tanks, when nature is intervened in, when trees are weaponized, when the world is upside down, and when movers are drowned, home is no longer home. Memories of the past collide, blur, and intersect with the present. What I see is a wired, uncomfortable assemblage of a vertically compressed path, a path of refuge that crosses time and space. It’s in this collection of machines and killing, running and congesting, drowning and bordering that people are confined into a bizarre spatiotemporal trap. Devastation remains. Tragedy endures.
In Blood In Love
Deriving from the coarse cloth and needles that are commonplace in grassroots families, the artwork is fabricated in a way that captures a scene of migrants’ life in the post-conflict era. Blood and an ambulance give a vivid depiction of the plight—physical and psychological—from which the refugees once suffered and are suffering. Yet pain and tears give birth to solidarity, the sense of connectedness and togetherness, and the sentiment of peace and healing. But it takes a radical form. The affinity, the rapport, and the love of refugees never obliterate their memories of the past and their stand. The optimistic illustration—or illusion—of marriage, of a complete family, and of beauty is placed hand-in-hand with the grave and grievance. Language composes the first layer of complexity in front of refugees. English runs into Sinhala. Arabic meets Tamil. Trauma and suffering join intimacy and warmth, in vocabulary, and in soul.
Link Road
In a blackout chamber, I came across a piece, a video, in which a little wooden canoe is juxtaposed with—yet confronted against—the giant metal monsters. When the past encounters the present, when the traditional meets the mechanical, the storm raises, and people move. Drawn into the middle of globalization and industrialization, the poor have no choice but to escape. They migrate to seek the recognition of the language, as well as the solidarity where they feel themselves reside. The water is the path. The water is the road. The water is moving, but the canoe is still. They never land. They never relieve. They were trapped in limbo. Yet they never know. The canoe is ever floating, and so does their identity. For migrants, as long as they set foot on the path—the water—they are there. They are floating. Nothing in their life is ever stable. They are hanged up, for good.
The Day & Differently Able & Widows
I saw borders.
I saw maps of cities and countries.
I saw lines of separation and migration.
I saw properties divided, and I saw human bodies severed.
The lines are never natural but rather imposed.
They break patterns.
They produce splinters.
Things are broken, and holes emerge.
In them there’s emptiness.
In them there’s blood.
Vessels are ruptured.
Dis-continuity raised.
Wounds are cleaved.
Dis-integrality raised.
Once they were knit.
Once they were torn.
They are everywhere.
Doesn’t quite fit, ugly, bloody, yet magnificent.
Healing the wound, the wound is there.
Erasing the print, the print never fades.
The broken is broken.
The broken never returns.