billboard commission #2

Jasleen Kaur: Women Hold Up Half The Sky

Launched March 14th, 2019

For her Billboard Commission, Jasleen Kaur used a 1936 image of a gymnastics display by members of the 2nd Royal Battalion (Ludhiana Sikhs), 11th Sikh Regiment in Waziristan, courtesy of the National Army Museum. She came across the photograph during her research into Punjabi and Sikh colonial histories, specifically related to The World Wars and the overlooked contribution from the colonies. More than this, she discovered the enlisting strategies found in recruitment handbooks for specific 'races' categorised under the convenient 'martial race theory' (under which the Sikhs were categorised), that revealed a more truthful and insidious side to the machine of empire and its appropriation and use of colonial bodies. Out of many images, this one stuck — tamed men, precariously balancing on each others necks. The accompanying blurb to this image on the National Army Museum website reads: “Gymnastics helped develop soldierly qualities such as strength, leadership, fitness, initiative, endurance, esprit de corps, teamwork and independence”. It is this conditioning of masculinity (in this case though the camaraderie of war) that interests Jasleen; what the writer Mrinalini Sinha describes as ‘colonial masculinity’ that continues to shape postcolonial identities of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ today.

In Women Hold Up Half The Sky, Jasleen uses collage to doctor the image of the military display with a repeated motif of her mother's hand, which now props up the gymnast’s bodies: a gesture to visualise her ongoing research into the invisibility of women’s voices and discovering non-masculine forms of resistance.

Jasleen Kaur (b.1986, Glasgow) is an artist currently living and working in London. Her work is an ongoing exploration into the malleability of culture and the layering of social histories within the material and immaterial things that surround us. Her practice examines the hierarchy of histories and labour using a range of mediums and methods including sculpture, video, conversation and cooking.

Artist website www.jasleenkaur.co.uk

Instagram @ _jasleen.kaur

Twitter @_jasleenkaur_

(images by Freya Dooley, 2019)