The ArQuives Digital Exhibitions

Oral History with Leila Sujir (2014)

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Dublin Core

Title

Oral History with Leila Sujir (2014)

Subject

Identity Politics, Desh Pardesh, Oral History, Immigration, India Hearts Beat, Leile Sujir, arts festival, Dreams of a Night Cleaner, Quebec

Description

Leila Sujir is an artist that first worked at Desh Pardesh in the late 1980s. Her work India Hearts Beat screened in Toronto, and she was invited to discuss it. She felt that Desh was a space of both validation and contention. She argues it gave emerging artists a space to present their work and gave a sense of importance to it, which was difficult in the racialized landscape of 1980s Toronto. Sujir also cites that the cultural context of Desh presented an overarching identity politics that concerned the population of Toronto. She felt that there was contention between groups, there was a competition of oppression and the rise of an “identity minefield”. Sujir also discusses her work Dreams of a Night Cleaner to conceptualize how physicality and space was a major component of her artistic work. She concludes the interview by discussing the erasure of oppression in her home province, Quebec and discusses briefly a new project in the UK.

Creator

South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC)

Date

2014-11-28

Contributor

Anna Malla
LGBTQ Oral History DIgital Collaboratory (Elspeth Brown, PI)

Rights

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Format

PDF, WAV

Language

English

Type

Sound, Text

Coverage

1980s Toronto, 2000s Quebec

Hyperlink Item Type Metadata

Citation

South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), “Oral History with Leila Sujir (2014),” The ArQuives Digital Exhibitions, accessed March 28, 2024, https://digitalexhibitions.arquives.ca/items/show/836.