'An Excerpt From The Bhatia Family Cassette Archives'
Mixed media installation, 2010AD
Cassettes, shelf, great grandma Maji's shawl c. 1913, amplifier, tape-deck.
Accompanying text: An Excerpt from the Bhatia Family Archives aims to give you an insight into my background as a fellow human being (quite how, I’m not sure).
These tapes, as far as I can surmise, were absorbed into my childhood sub-consciousness, and lead me to share a collective consciousness with the rest of the Bhatia family. I believe, in all sincerity, that they left an indelible mark upon my character as a functioning member of our glorious society.
There are certain traits that exist temporally within families and I propose that it is obsession that is prevalent in mine. This obsession is manifest in the form of categorization, collecting, recording and arranging. For example, my father has kept a record of the different species of bird he has seen, when he saw them and where since the late 1960’s in a series of detailed notebooks.
The organisation of objects and subsequent arranging as it was passed down the generations has quite literally become an artform. I myself have amassed ethnographic trinkets (some say junk) and compulsively curated my own little museum (albeit in my bedroom).
My uncle Arun has been buying and obsessively recording music for over 40 years. He habitually, to the extremes of addiction, buys CD’s, records them onto tape, mini-disc and ultimately stores them in the families London loft. There was genuine concern as to the structural integrity of the house due to the sheer weight of all his recordings. I am told that the Bhatacharjee family (exluding uncle Arun of course) quite earnestly feared for their lives.
Omar Zingaro Bhatia, son of Zulfikar & Jennifer Bhatia, Brother to Ally Bhatia
The preview will be held at 6-8PM on the 4th of June and my blog readers are all welcome (of course). An after-show will be held at the Roxy Art House. I look forward.
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