Haath/ Haathi (2023)
Moving image work, recorded on Gadigal Land and found footage of the Ganesha festival from BBC. Duration- 3 mins. 30 sec.
Haath is the Hindi word for hand and Haathi the Hindi word for elephant.
In Sydney, Australia, numerous blogs have been documenting and writing about elephants often imported from Asia and Africa during colonisation, that were buried under the mounds of land that is now popularly called Sydney Park. This space is now used by pet-parents and children to play, run and often joyfully roll down its hilly spaces.
Although never officially revealed, this lore that just might be speculative fiction, becomes a gateway to explore culture, history, companion species and belonging within ‘Haath/ Haathi’.
Haath / Haathi, 2023. https://youtu.be/MTV5fYWBCCQ?si=6OnVHK1kTWPol2RW
Elephants are also living beings that intensely mourn their dead and are deeply sentimental. So to mourn the displaced elephants that might have been buried along with their forgotten past, the artist moves across the mounds of Sydney Park – mimicking the trunk of the regal animal with her hands.
The language of the Indian traditional dance of Bharatnatyam is also a part of the artist’s dialect while moving through the space, breathing in the loss and connection to her own displacement of land and country. Being of Persian heritage but, born and brought up in Mumbai, India she’s grown up surrounded by various cultures and oral histories and mythologies, such as that of the Hindu god- Ganesha, the Elephant-headed God. The worship of this deity and the story of his birth adds to the cultural ties to body, place, gender and memory that weld together in this project.
Still from Haath/ Haathi.