Vasuki Shanmuganathan: dream warrior
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“We’re often tasked with finding the best stories or the greatest events. It’s always the superlative,” Vasuki Shanmuganathan reflects. “But I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in the mundane.”
As the founder of the award-winning Tamil Archive Project (TAP), and a Research Associate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics with the Race, Ethics, and Power Project, Shanmuganathan is hyperattuned to the values placed on stories and artifacts.
In a 2021 work created for a TAP gallery exhibition titled for all, i care, she and a group of artists set up a booth on a stretch of the Lakeshore in south Etobicoke and asked locals about their feelings and experiences with care.
“We were listening to an incredibly rich history of labour,” Shanmuganathan says. But it was a history that was being taken for granted.
“Much of the city was celebrating a lot of people in the care profession, and here we were across from people who were cleaning the hotels, who were nurses, who had to move because they no longer could afford the rent, who were going through rehabilitation programs.”
“Mattered,” the piece she created in response to the stories the group collected, honed in on recurring mentions of liquid.
“One person talked about working in a kitchen feeding a lot of people that were working the night shift. She had talked in detail about the kinds of changes that happen to your body. You know, if you handle too much grease or if you handle certain objects like cleaning detergent, over time, that also wears the body down.”
Consisting of a small wooden curio containing glass jars of these liquids that would typically be washed away or otherwise forgotten, gallery attendees could then pick up and smell the different samples. As an archival undertaking, “Mattered” centered labour by putting its literal residues (cleaning detergent, sweat, kitchen grease, oily factory residue) on display, the work itself a form of residual care — care about often thankless acts of communal commitment, care about care.
“Mattered,” 2021.
Lingering on these discarded vignettes if only for briefly longer than one typically might, Shanmuganathan’s art reunites the individual with the value they create by elevating the mundane, pulling it into sharper focus.
As a TAP exhibition, the show was largely indicative of the project’s approach to archiving.
Omitting concrete materials, TAP focuses instead on facilitating knowledge exchange and communal care.
“It’s all about these community activations where people get to share their oral histories,” Shanmuganathan says. “Not asking for material presences, but rather for memories that they wish to share, and also being comfortable with things that will never be shared.”
“In the dream world, you can’t be surveilled. It’s one of the spaces where technology cannot surveil you. I hope.”
For Shanmuganathan, the mundane provides an important function “as an entry point to thinking about how we exist as people, but also about the kinds of history we think of as important or unimportant.”
How we value that, she says, has critical implications.
“We’re moving closer and closer to this privileging of the mechanical eye. Or the biopolitical eye. The eye asks, ‘are you legible?’ Or ‘can I read you?’ and if the eye can’t read you, you’re outside this world of hyperconnectivity. Which obviously also has horrible implications for racialized people,” she explains. “And then you have the other side, which is often rendered irrational, or it’s sometimes even feminized, and it’s dismissed as this aesthetic occupation with visions and spectacular things and things that don’t really fit into a rational narrative. And to me that became a point that I kept returning to in trying to think about how we also approach archives.”
Positioning her work in stark contrast to the casually invasive scrutiny of surveillance capitalism, which simultaneously succeeds at abstracting histories of the mundane into capital and alienating them from the individual responsible for having created their value (an effect felt even more deeply by racialized communities, for whom surveillance is routinely weaponized), Shanmuganathan’s art subverts that ideology by denying its hard, supposedly objective reality extractions, creating instead more porous spaces that invite collaboration and sharing.
When exhibiting “Mattered,” none of the jars contained in the curio were labelled to reflect their contents, inviting audiences to immerse themselves and bring their own associations to the work. Inevitably, attendees would share their own labour experiences.
“I just let people look at the jar and make up their own narrative that they could connect to.”
“Token of Devotion,” a 2020 work she created with Kat Bell and Yasmeen Nematt Alla in residency with UKAI Project built a virtual venue where users could connect with their own care values through a text quiz, their divulged instincts and feelings about the prompts obscured on the back end by the abstract nature of the questions.
As generative work, Shanmuganathan’s art revalues storytelling and consent, especially in the community she’s immersed in.
Herself a refugee of the Sri Lankan Civil War spanning 1983 to 2009 and the Sinhalese government’s attempted genocide of Tamils, she’s witnessed firsthand the affects of weaponized surveillance.
“There is an incredibly long history — since probably the rise of Buddhism [in Sri Lanka] — of Tamil people being cast as these undesirable figures on the island,” Shanmuganathan explains. “If you’re a Tamil person you need an identity card and that identity card can be demanded of you wherever you are. If you can’t produce it, it can be cause for imprisonment, torture, and much worse. Or there are restrictions on mobility, restrictions on which schools and universities you can go to.”
Reaching further back, regional mythology created a Tamil demon, and marked it the arbiter of dreams, nightmares, and madness.
In more recent years, when the MV Ocean Lady and MV Sun Sea — ships collectively containing 568 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers — arrived on the coast of BC in 2009, the Harper Government used the refugees as propaganda to shift immigration policy away from a humanitarian approach to one calling for caps and suspensions, also labelling the now defunct Tamil Tigers a terrorist group, casting a negative light on the entire Tamil community in the process. Although the group has been defunct since the same year, the designation lasts to this day — an injury some Tamil Canadians argue holds the community back from moving forward.
“Oftentimes, mythologies are very telling about the kind of nationhood building happening,” Shanmuganathan offers.
Exploring these intersections of oppression, for Pauvuṉ, her contribution to Hypercity, Shanmuganathan is reclaiming those histories, creating an AR world where the dream demons are protectors against surveillance capitalism.
“In the dream world, you can’t be surveilled. It’s one of the spaces where technology cannot surveil you. I hope.”
Accessing the work in situ via the Hypercity app, users will be able to use their smart device cameras to find guardians sitting on top of signs or hovering near storefronts, places one might naturally assume security devices to track their movements.
Plotted for activation near Lansdowne Station, the location is significant, too, home to a Tamil co-op that was created to house Tamil refugees.
For Shanmuganathan, it comes back to the mundane, wresting the pedestrian experience from the absurd conditions that police and commodify it.
“I just wanted people to know they entered this space where they can feel protected,” she says. “I hope it’s playful enough for people to realize that surveillance is also a ridiculous thing.”
Vasuki Shanmuganathan’s Pauvuṉ is a part of Long Winter’s Hypercity programming, running November 2022 through March 2023. Join Vasuki at Dufferin Mall on January 19 for a personalized talisman making workshop (register here).