on India and its
Diaspora’s Heritage
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WORK by SEEMA MATTU
Seema is a moving-image artist based between Birmingham and London. As a gender-expansive Valmiki artist, Seema’s practice is framed as an immersive and multi-channel theme park known as SEEMAWORLD (2021) https://newart.city/show/seemaworld. This created world with digital artefacts and digitised works of conventional media contains amenities and services that catapult the viewer to specific portals. These cover manifold themes to do with the caste system, queer sorcery, non-specific and othered cultures, fan labour and gender taxonomy in 2D and 3D mixed-media.
SEEMAWORLD
Seema is a moving-image artist based between Birmingham and London. As a gender-expansive Valmiki artist, Seema’s practice is framed as an immersive and multi-channel theme park known as SEEMAWORLD (2021) https://newart.city/show/seemaworld. This created world with digital artefacts and digitised works of conventional media contains amenities and services that catapult the viewer to specific portals. These cover manifold themes to do with the caste system, queer sorcery, non-specific and othered cultures, fan labour and gender taxonomy in 2D and 3D mixed-media.
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T-Pose (2021
‘T-Pose’ (2021) is an amalgamation of various software to produce animated work that takes real-life movements, gestures and behaviours performed by Seema into other times, spaces and physical looks inside SEEMAWORLD.
In one other scenario, SEEMAWORLD contains a 3D model of the uterus occupying the imagined space called the Youterus. As a symbol of rebirth, Youterus is a vascular interactive map through which the interlocking narratives of existing and imaginary worlds can be explored.
Listen to Seema talk about her experience of discrimination in the UK and multimedia expressions as a reflection of her intersectional identity.
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우정 (2021)
The mixed-media animation, 우정, which is the Korean word for friendship, is sparked by a Virtual Reality (VR) experience that starts inside a magical ice rink of sorts. Four friends visit a VR Bar and enter separate white pods led by technicians in white strapped outfits and hefty accessories. It feels like an episode of the TV series, Black Mirror.
In the pod, each friend is alone in a darkened shell, although their voices can be heard through one another’s headsets, and this becomes the vehicle through which their bonds are maintained in the virtual space. Seema explores the theme and value of friendship by going back 17 years, eight years and one year in the virtual space.
Seema says, ‘by depicting the delicacies of my most historical and cherished friendships, I explore the blossoming of new friendships - which have been made possible through this exchanged programme.’
Her friends’ thoughts, locations and bodies are always in new places too, as the past comes alive while they look at what is coming before them at any one time. New possibilities are celebrated while each person takes on a role – the cricket, the savant, the sage and the villain. VR creates a sense of immersion, oneness and 'our-ness'.
For They Are: The Untouchables
No Blasphemies
Performed through the artist's own cosplay, ‘No Blasphemies’ (2021) is a satirical music video, which foreshadows and alludes to Youterus, the 3D model of the uterus symbolising rebirth in SEEMAWORLD. Inside Youterus is an unfolding high-fantasy, mixed-media narrative, which is framed against a discriminatory caste system. Youterus looks to Vidding as a framework and falls under her interpretation and fascination with Fan Labour (reclaimed within SEEMAWORLD as Fan Labia). Youterus is both the interactive map through which this narrative can be charted, and the planet alluded to within the narrative itself.
Through the use of archival, personal and community footage, ‘Hijra = Higher’ (2021) depicts wonders of the South Asian community, who are economic migrants but often considered as fortune-tellers. Seema offers allusions to a character whose identity reflects layers of complexity. They appear higher in a different reality, and in a narrative structure that departs from western transgendered perspectives.