Identity art, that unimpeachable artistic genre of two decades ago, is back – or so suggests this five-artist show, which has the period style of portentous, colon-addicted titling down pat. The difference today is that identity is recognised as being more slippery, more multiple, involving displacement and salads of mixed genes.
Nina Mangalanayagam, for example, was raised in Sweden with a Danish mother and Tamil father: a video shows her failing to master Indian body language while subtitles recount her linguistic and behavioural difficulties as she shuttled between social groups. Anthony Key, meanwhile, measures diaspora via an epic scroll of stitched-together chopsticks engraved with the names of Chinese restaurants in England; a ketchup bottle filled with soy sauce is here classified as a self-portrait.
Less binary and illustrative is the half-Japanese, half-English Simon Fujiwara’s anecdote-rich video discussion of reading, as a youth, Japanese translations of Huckleberry Finn – his identification with the black character, his own interracial relationships, the country’s censorings, etc. What beguiles here, though, is a weird, intermittent staginess to the conversation, making it as ambiguous as selfhood.
The final work returns to sociology: Navin Rawanchaikul’s video of seven Indian migrants living in Chiang Mai, Thailand, discussing the unpredictable adaptations of resettling. If a couple of decades of globalisation have, unsurprisingly, only convoluted identity, the challenge for artists still appears to be the old one: how to present their field research in dynamic ways.