'Dr Chila Kumari Singh Burman’s work uses items such as garishly coloured ice-cream spoons and eye-splittingly tinselled cones to create a world (such as with ‘Cornets and Screwballs Go Vegas’) where disposability and immediacy hide more personal refences to family and heritage. These are reflected in the iconography of bindis and sauwastikas and also in Dr Burman’s family background in the ice cream business. This is shown again in her ‘Spooning’ series, which puns on the intimacy/disposability tensions that characterise her work here.'
- Dr Craig Jordan-Baker
This multi-media exhibition examines the relationship between architectural sites and human trauma, hidden, buried, embedded in, and embodied by those sites.
The show uses painting, film, animation, sculpture and interactive installations to explore how, rather than offering us refuge and protection, buildings and architectural sites can cast shadows over our personal, interpersonal and psychological landscape in haunting and lasting ways.
This exhibition invites you to wander from site to site unearthing experiences, feelings and histories that have been overlaid, overlooked, constructed and concealed. Through these sites there are many surfacings. We move between the personal traumas housed behind the bricks and mortar of domestic spaces to the onslaught on memory, identity and community as regeneration projects reduce neighbourhoods to rubble. There is nothing safe in houses. We consider the omnipresence of buildings present or absent that insistently and threateningly keep us within their sight and we show how even the nature we escape to is just another constructed site culturally containing and constraining us in an endless replay of preordained ways of being.