Rajinder Singh
Rajinder Singh/Fold
Born in Ipoh, Malaysia he now lives in Dublin, Ireland. Rajinder’s paintings and installations as well as photography, video and performance work explore ideas around the vulnerable body and its pain, interrogating the economies of power that deny it space and shape. Raj writes: I am a migrant artist exploring ways the human body folds and unfolds around borders, topographic, symbolic or otherwise. My video in this exhibition touches on some of the concepts I am working with just now. For this video I juxtaposed a kaleidoscopic reading of four floor plans of an ancient mosque, a kuil and a gurudwara as well as the Christ Church Cathedral with a video of Alina dancing to a song that calls out “In my home, O foreigner! You are welcome”. The kaleidoscope reminds me of the ancient ornate floor of the cathedral. I was interested in how Alina’s body folded into the hushed tones and sculpted spaces of the cathedral. She moved along its seams, into its folds, delicately stepping into its rarefied air in an almost-whisper. I felt her body adjust as she quietly moved through its cavernous halls and its small enclosures. We filmed almost everywhere in the cathedral, take after take, while I watched a dancer settle into the cathedral’s quiet, into its myriad tones and its ornate vestibules, into its sacred charms and its delicate beauty. I have recently become interested in this idea of the fold as a bodily or a somatic practice. What is the somatic function of folding? What if your body is continually folding and enfloding and unfolding; folding around and into space, adjusting externally and internally in fractal like origami moves? In this video I combine the architectural and the bodily thrust of pattern making through the creative reciprocities of folding.
