On Heritage and the Humanities: Research and Creation

In summer 2021, the artist Pushpamala N. (http://www.pushpamala.com/) was part of a show at the Aicon Contemporary Gallery in New York City, showing works from a series of fifty objects entitled “Atlas of Rare and Lost Alphabets (2018-2020).” (https://www.aiconcontemporary.com/exhibitions/given-time-the-gift-and-its-offerings) The series was intended to explore current issues related to land and control by representing the historical land grants given by kings; through an exploration of royal land grants in themselves, the project later developed into a meditation on historical scripts and languages. The objects are described by the artist in the published description of her work as being “like ancient epigraphs [that] become a ‘pseudo-archive’ which yield no information and exist for themselves.”

As Pushpamala’s work shows so vividly, contemporary art today engages with the past in multiple dimensions; at the same time, it fundamentally addresses the present. Historians and other scholars engaging with the past in other disciplines thus share a common interest with such artists, and a common location in relation to both the present and past. All, also, engage with the future. We see this clearly in one other example, in the work of Beatrice Glow (2017, 197), which explores the intertwined histories of “land dispossession, genocidal trauma, and globalization’s wheel of fortune” through people, place, and commodity in the history of colonialism by means of installation, digital storytelling and virtual reality technologies.

The exhibition “Dūje Pāse Toṅ: From the other side, Arts from the Two Punjabs” was created in keeping with these engagements with the past, in relation to our present. The exhibition explores cultural history and legacies of trauma that have broad import both in South Asia and to South Asian Canadian communities. We address the past – the past of Partition – through the present: what is the impact of Partition, today, and how does it continue to shape lives? what forms of life and sociality were lost with the drawing of the border, and how can this loss be addressed within the continuing Partitioned world? how can we evoke that which is lost, and therefore is truly of the past, in the ongoing present? The work thus connects the history of this event, Partition, with its ongoing lived realities, for new generations of Punjabis on both sides of the border, and beyond. It also helps us all to consider the violence of border-making and the exclusions it entails.

The exhibition also invites us to consider how the arts can produce new kinds of historical knowledge. The writing of history is characterized by a commitment to facts, to reconstruct an accurate portrait and analysis of the past: research is fundamental to it. Research was fundamental to the works produced here, in this exhibition, too, in different modes: we see in these works examples of oral history, interviews, participant observation, documentary film, literature, and the sociology of language. All of these research methods are then made visual. Engaging with history through the visual arts allows for new kinds of critical reflection on the relationship between past and present, the formation of borders and communities, and the practice of “heritage.” As Glen Lowry has noted, “the collision of research and creative practice challenges the divisions of labour separating art and culture from knowledge, as well as cultural production from scholarship” (Lowry 2020, 163).

We can easily see such work in the guise of the public humanities as dissemination or knowledge mobilization, but how does it function, itself, as research? The Public Humanities constitute a growing interest in Canadian universities; the University of British Columbia has formed a new Public Humanities Hub in recent years, which aims to promote public engagement by and with the Humanities. The US-based “Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life” initiative, which has also been influential in Canada, articulates the founding ethos for such efforts: what can be done by “artists, humanists, designers, and other scholars in the cultural disciplines who passionately wanted to claim engagement at the core of their identities as intellectuals and artists.”¹ Such work does not just represent research. It produces both new knowledge and new forms of knowledge, new forms of documentation, and engages with the texts and histories at the centre of Humanities work in new and significant ways. Creative work can thus extend and change our readings of the past and the present; oral histories describe a different world from that of the archive, and the performance of a text constitutes a different kind of reading. Work in this vein moves beyond an understanding of the public humanities as fundamentally being defined by the articulation of the humanities and social sciences as contributing to the public good, or in defence of their value: we take these as foundational (Provençal 2011; along these lines, see also Benneworth 2015a & 2015b, Gibson & Hazelkorn 2017). Instead, we have sought in this project to discover what the public humanities can achieve as a research form, as “Research-Creation.”

This exhibition and the work within it thus embrace Natalie Loveless’s definition of Research-Creation as “a site of generative recrafting” (2019, 3). We are guided here by the work of Chapman and Sawchuck (2012, 2015), which explores different dimensions of the intersection of research and creation, in four modes: (1) research-for-creation; (2) research-from-creation; (3) creative presentations of research; and (4) creation-as-research. The first of these modes, “research-for-creation” is seen in the work of Pushpamala N. and Beatrice Glow, referenced at the beginning of this essay: research that feeds and is expressed in creation. The third, “creative presentations of research,” is one that scholars in a wide range of disciplines have engaged in, in multiple ways, through exhibitions, performances and films; this mode somehow leaves intact, however, the separation of these two things, “research” and “creation” (Chapman and Sawchuck 2012, 12-13). Creative means are used to express research, to mobilize knowledge, but that is after the fact, not integral to the research process itself. Yet, “research-creation” as a transformative practice allows for interdisciplinary integration and collaboration that are not always inherent to these two things as separate entities, and can intersect both (Loveless 2019).

In this schema, it is (2) “research-from-creation” and (4) “creation-as-research,” as two modes of work that break down the binary between research and creation as they conventionally exist in both the fine and performing arts and the humanities/social sciences. Research-from-creation is defined by Chapman and Sawchuck (2015, 49) as “the extrapolation of theoretical, methodological, ethnographic or other insights from creative processes, which are then looped back into the project that generated them”; “creation-as-research” entails “an engagement with the ontological question of what constitutes research in order to make space for creative material and process-focused research-outcomes.” These two modes of work are more complex, and difficult to achieve. But they were at the centre of what we tried to do. The projects began with a more traditional publication: a workshop at an international scholarly conference —specifically, the European Conference for South Asian Studies—and a resulting edited volume (Mahn & Murphy 2018). This was a beginning. The process that brought the exhibition itself together was iterative, over several years and with the support of diverse funding sources – it was pursued in India, then traveled to London, then to Pakistan, and then to Canada. The process itself fed back into its configuration at different stages. Research took place along the way, through discussion and formal exchange, and through public programs in India at Preet Nagar, in London (at the British Library and in a public exhibition and conference at the British Film Institute), in Pakistan through meetings and public talks, and in Canada in the exhibition itself.

How does the representation of the past through the arts impact our understanding of that past? How does it allow for the posing of new kinds of questions, and new kinds of answers, about that past?

The works in the exhibition answer these questions, each in different ways. The work of Rachita Burjupati evokes loss of language, and of diversity, and calls into question how we define language itself: Punjabi as a language is defined fundamentally by the border that divides Punjabis from each other (Murphy 2018). Jason Baerg’s work, creating a resonant engagement with the river Ravi with a group of Lahore-based artists, connects colonial histories of division and displacement, between Indigenous Canada and the natural landscape of Punjab, divided in two with great violence at decolonization in 1947. The violence of colonial rule marks the connection between these “nations,” Canada and Pakistan, and Baerg’s intervention invites different configurations of what landscape and belonging might mean, in different terms, and the global nature of the larger process of decolonization. Raghavendra Rao K.V.’s work created in Lahore invites critical reflection on the representation of Islam in the history and present of South Asia, and particularly in India. In the urgent political time we work within in the 2020s, when anti-Muslim violence has escalated and normalized in the postcolonial state of India, this work of art challenges us to consider the politics of representation at all times. And as Sana Iqbal’s work eloquently tells us – memories take a visceral, material form all around us, ubiquitous and often unnoticed, and yet demanding recognition. All the work in the exhibition stands as testimony to the enduring impact of colonialism and its continuing forms, and the urgency of the need to address this history and present, both.

One major goal of this exhibition and the processes that made it possible was to create a space for dialogue and engagement about and across borders. This project brought together people from/in (and beyond), and work created in, Pakistan and India. Travel between these countries is impossible for most of their citizens; Canada here provided a third location for a meeting of artists and work that would be difficult or impossible otherwise. The pandemic, sadly, prevented us from bringing together the artists themselves, which was a goal. The work and this catalog, therefore, in a way stands in for a set of meetings that yet again could not take place. Still, both are important, in that it does address the whole of Punjab—in India, Pakistan, and the diaspora—and in the Canadian context. Punjabi heritage here is a lived interpretive practice, addressing a history of loss and the ongoing presence of the past in contested border-zones and border crossings. Each artist brings their vision of this to us; it is up to us, to take it further.

Works Cited:

Chapman, Owen and Kim Sawchuk. 2012. “Research-Creation: Intervention, analysis and ‘family resemblances’.” Canadian Journal of Communication 37, 1; 5-26.

——. 2015. “Creation-as-Research: Critical Making in Complex Environments” RACAR: revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review , 2015, 40, 1: 49-52.

Glow, Beatrice. 2017. “Circulating Undercurrents.” Cultural Politics 13, 2: 194-201.

Loveless, Natalie. 2019. How to make art at the end of the world: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Durham: Duke University Press.

Lowry, Glen. 2020. “Provoking Failure: Un-Settling a Research-Creation Framework (Provocation).” In Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation, Natalie Loveless, ed., 161-189. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2020. Canadian Electronic Library/desLibris, Downloaded 10-07-2021.

Mahn, Churnjeet and Anne Murphy. 2018. Partition and the Practice of Memory. London: Palgrave.

Murphy, Anne. 2018. “Writing Punjabi Across Borders.” South Asian History and Culture 9, 1: 68-91.