Sven Christian [SC]: Last year we were approached by Aazhi Archives, who were working on a project of the same name — Sea: A Boiling Vessel — that brought writers, academics, artists, musicians, performers together to explore the maritime history of Kerala as a node or gateway opening out towards the rest of the world. I was invited to Kochi to attend the exhibition and surrounding programmes in January 2023, and to think about how artists practising in South Africa might be able to add to, enrich, or complicate the broader conversations that were being had; to look at different histories or stories from within South Africa that had ties to the Indian Ocean. I was interested in the sonic, and was drawn to the idea, outlined in their initial curatorial statement, of the ocean as this enigmatic thing — this space of unknowing, of potential but also danger — and what it means to inhabit a similar sort of grey zone.

To this end, this iteration of the exhibition is comprised of three works: a sculptural installation by Reshma Chhiba, titled On the tip of my tongue (2023), a painting of Chhiba’s titled The annihilation of time (2023), and an audiowork by Kamyar Bineshtarigh titled Inshaaf (2020), in which you hear the voice of a woman trying to read a passage written in one language (Arabic) in the tongue of another (Afrikaans). There are obvious, quite literal associations between this audiowork and Chhiba’s sculptural installation, but to start, I wanted to unpack the use of particular symbols in both of your practices more broadly; to discuss the symbol as something that is sedimented, something that encases a particular or multiple meanings, and how these get read differently across time, by different people… Reshma, perhaps we could chat about the place of Kali’s tongue in your practice, where that originated, and your engagement with that particular symbol?

Reshma Chhiba [RS]: I’ve never actually been asked this question [Laughs]. It’s so central. My engagement with Kali began in 2004. She is such a loaded figure — this archetype who is wild and dishevelled and naked and violent. Within the community she is feared; outside of the community she is often borrowed, for example, by early first wave white feminism, as a kind of ‘feminist poster child’… Part of my engagement stems from my own very young, feminist anger that I felt at the time, which has subdued over the years, but for me it was about how do you take all this stuff and draw from her to find those moments of distillation? From a single image of Kali I start to pull out things, and one aspect is the tongue. Another association of the tongue is languaging, for sure, which is becoming more dominant in my thinking now. At the beginning of my practice the tongue was more about the erotic suggestion and as a defiant gesture — sticking one’s tongue out to make fun of, point at, ridicule, and call out – speaking out was central to my practice at the time… The story of Kali’s outstretched tongue comes from mythology. There is a story about how she steps on her counterpart, Shiva, and sticks her tongue out like, ‘Oops. I stood on him,” which for me adds some humour to the image itself. Many myths surround her and why her tongue is outstretched, so that became the starting point. Over time, it has become about the bodily — the tongues start to become the size of my own body, and to symbolise not just Kali but the voicing of many women and the conversations that I think about in different ways, whether it’s these conversations of the yonis (the vaginas), or this tongue that starts to speak.

With On the tip of my tongue, I thought more about this dismembering of the tongue from the body, because your prompt about the sea was important for me. As I move into different research areas I am thinking more and more about that dislocation: when tongues cross oceans, what happens to them? How do they dismember from the body and from the place? What does that relocation mean, and what does that translation look like? This lobbing-off of the tongue is almost bodily, so the work is scaled to the size of my body — it’s one-and-a-half metres high. In some ways it stands in for the body more than my other tongue sculptures have. Mother Tongues (2020) might conjure up the idea of bodies walking, charging, running through battlefields, but this one is more directly related to my own thinking about languaging, dismembering, dislocation, migration, and relocation — the movement of that tongue over the ocean.

SC: I guess that’s a good point to introduce Kamyar’s work, because the origins of Arabic-Afrikaans share a similar migratory route, with multiple “origins.” Kamyar, could you provide some background to your work and your use of text? I know you were drawn to Arabic-Afrikaans in thinking about form and the structure of language — how these symbols come to retain meaning, but also how your work tends to blur or release words from meaning… Could you talk about how you began working with words in that way?

Kamyar Bineshtarigh [KB]: My interest and initial approach to words — text and writing — was quite abstract. On one hand it was personal. My background and family played a role, as well as where I come from. I’m from Iran and grew up around my dad and uncle practicing calligraphy. I practiced some too, but it was very particular. It’s like martial arts — something that you have to perfect. It has to be very precise. After that I moved to Cape Town. I went to art school and studied contemporary art. I also started painting, so the two interests merged and this blurred line between writing and abstraction came into place. It also made me question what writing is — it’s basically marks that we put on paper. They make sense to us because we’re educated in these forms or shapes, which we translate first into a letter, then a word, then a sentence. But my interest in calligraphy and abstract art made me think more about this blurred line between abstraction and meaning-making through writing. So the project that I started was about how we make sense of letters and writing, without getting detached from my identity and background.

SC: I’d like to share the image of the text that is being read from in your audiowork Inshaaf. Maybe you can walk us through this…

KB: I wanted to go deeper into languages, specifically writing. First I was interested in Farsi, which uses Arabic letters. It’s a form of phonetic writing, much like the Roman alphabet. So English, French, German, Spanish — all the Latin languages — use more or less the same Roman characters. There are some that get added to a language because there’s a sound, like in German, that is not in English, so they add two dots or other accents to make that sound. Arabic letters are the same. Farsi uses them, Urdu uses them… Since it’s phonetic you can make a sound into a letter, and a letter into a word. In South Africa, we all know about Afrikaans — its background, where it came from — but I went to high school here and was taught that Afrikaans was a language of Dutch origin; a language of the colonisers. Through research I found out that this actually wasn’t the case; that Afrikaans was a creole language. Slaves were brought here from South East Asia, and they brought their own languages from countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, which got mixed with Dutch, but there was no written language at the time, so Afrikaans was never written because it was considered kombuistaal — “kitchen Dutch.” But during that time, there were Muslims in Cape Town who knew how to write in Arabic. They started writing Afrikaans using Arabic letters, and initiated madrassah in Cape Town, which was this Islamic school to teach. The only letters that were widely known were Arabic, and since it’s phonetic, they started writing Afrikaans in Arabic letters — that’s how the first written Afrikaans happened.

When I learnt about this history I became interested in how written language can form, and especially how Afrikaans, which is mainly Dutch, began its life in writing in Arabic. I started looking for documents written in Arabic-Afrikaans to reference in my paintings. With the sound piece, I found a document that had both Arabic-Afrikaans and its transliteration into Roman Afrikaans. I asked a friend, Inshaaf Jamodien, who I was studying with — who is Muslim, went to madrassah, could read and write Arabic, and whose mother tongue is Afrikaans — if she could read the Arabic written text. She could read it letter by letter but would struggle to put it into words, because her eyes are very much used to reading Afrikaans in Roman characters. In the audiowork you can hear her struggling to read. Then you realise that she’s trying to read Arabic-Afrikaans; that the language is Afrikaans, written in Arabic letters.

SC: Today was the first time that I actually saw the document from which she was reading. I’ve been listening to it for the duration of the exhibition, but it’s interesting to see both languages figured on the page. In both of your work, there seems to be this push back against the puritanical, the idea of a single origin, and a way of pulling something apart that has become sedimented or singular; opening it up to explore different potentialities. I know, Reshma, from reading The Yoni Book (2019) — your conversations with Nontobeko [Ntombela] and the various essays therein — that there’s also this biographical link to your grandmother, who also spoke a lingua franca, who spoke both Gujarati and Fanagalo… Maybe you could speak about the place of language through that channel in your work?

RC: I often question whether the work starts at my grandmother or at Kali. I feel like they almost enter my space at the same time, and this is after her death: she died when I was fourteen, and when I was older I started learning more about her, and I also happened upon Kali around the same time. Part of my interest is in thinking about a patriarchal push back within the community (that I come from). Naturally, I would gravitate towards thinking about her life and what she would do with this life, that is probably not something that she chose for herself, and what this means. That’s how I start an imagined conversation with her. I say imagined because it’s post her death. So this conversation sort of happens through my mother. I found out about my grandmother’s life and the difficulties that women of her generation faced; women who came as migrant bodies, often not by choice but because of marriage or whatever else. This is post indenture. My grandmother spoke Gujarati. I speak it exceptionally badly, and again it goes back to the dismembering I mentioned. The loss of time, that severing, is very important, because now I want to learn the language but the tongue doesn’t roll as easily when trying to form those words. In my head it does, but not when it comes out of the mouth, so the communication with her when she was alive was almost non-existent, or very one-sided. And I felt like it would have been too disrespectful to respond in English.

Fanagalo is a language that she had to speak. She found herself in this space, on a farm, and now, how do we communicate? It’s about creolisation and how language starts to become organic, with various languages pre-existing in the place, and how people from different parts of the world start to communicate. I’m also interested in communication in other forms, which I’ll get into as an expansion of how I think about language, but the thing I want to say about my grandmother and her push back is that as much as she was stuck within a patriarchal society — that in many ways she had no choices — she still took financial ownership of her space. She made samoosas and atchar from home and made money for the house. She ran the budget. She raised her kids. As a point of defiance, she also refused the English tongue, to speak the colonial tongue.

She came from a space that was for a long time colonial India, so she was aware of English. I’m quite sure she knew the language, but she refused to speak it. There’s an interesting tension there. In my own practice, that moment of speaking back to her is important. Along with Kali, it’s where the work starts. I think they came together. Sometimes I think they’re the same. There’s a defiant spirit in both of them, a resonance to masculinity that is acted out in both in very pragmatic and transcendent ways.

I’m also interested in the language of storytelling, which comes through in the stories of Kali and how I distill them. The paintings are about that distillation. The languaging is in the symbols drawn out from Kali, whether it’s swords, tongues, hair, or the photographed performances by others or myself. The story is also the translation of the medium, for example, the sari. Instead of covering the body it might reveal the body, so nakedness is suddenly on the surface rather than being hidden. The material takes on new meanings. Storytelling exists in my practice in a very direct way, and is becoming more dominant through dance. I’m trained as a Bharatanatyam dancer, but I’m still learning — I don’t think one ever fully learns an art form. What Kamyar is saying about calligraphy and repetition as a way to get better also makes me think about what getting better means, when so many things change. Your hand changes over time. Your body changes over time. Your thoughts change. Even your relationship to these things change. My relationship to the stories has changed. One learns the stories of women in mythology in particular ways, to translate and communicate to an audience who is probably familiar with them. Now I’m interested in how to break that story: How do we dismantle the story? How do we disrupt, most often, the patriarchy within which it is written and for which it is upheld?

The style of dance that I practice is very coded. The languaging is in the gesture, the face, the posture… The body becomes the vessel for communicating, and that body is the same body that came over the ocean in that vessel or ship. While it carried all its things, its clothes, it also carried dance. And dance as the communicator, the storyteller. I’m interested in trying to locate that moment when that body came onto that ship, carrying that dance, but then became the labouring body on the cane fields. I digress, but that’s how I think about language. Language is both a material, physical, and often unspoken vocabulary. The communication of dance is quite specific. I relate it to sign language, so where both women speak the same story using an unspoken language. Both are communicating — I want to say ‘verbalising’ — the same story, but differently.

SC: You spoke about what happens when someone gets on the ship and moves. There’s this process, I guess, which is also temporal, where, through repetition (or in the case of the madrassah, rote learning), things get ingrained, memorised, and repeated back. Over time it becomes like muscle memory, right? It embeds itself. Even though it can pass generationally, you might forget where that particular gesture or form comes from. In both of your work, repetition also becomes the means to break it open again. Things that sediment might undergo a process of slow accretion, but you can also, through repetition, move in reverse. The first work that I saw of yours, Reshma, was Mother Tongues (2020) at the Stellenbosch Triennale. Here the use of repetition is quite literal — there are these repeated yonis — but it’s also present in your painting, through the repeated puncturing of the canvas or fabric that you use. Maybe we could talk about such repetition and the agency that one finds through that kind of labour?

RC: It’s interesting that you also use the word labour, because the practice of ‘piercing,’ ‘puncturing,’ ‘penetrating’ — all of those are words that I use purposefully, trying to reconcile the labour practices that my grandmother would have gone through. Or women of her time, or before her time, even my mother. It’s the kind of labour that these women had no choice but to perform. In some ways, this repetitive, penetrating gesture becomes cathartic. Moving and dancing around the canvas is also meditative. But of course, these things evolve and generate more meaning with time. For me, what becomes important about repetition is that it can also become about silencing something; how one can see something so much that one no longer hears/sees it. Numbering is also important. With Mother Tongues, there are ten. It’s not important that you know this, but it’s important for me, because ten is a reference to Kali and the ten different versions of the goddess, from the nurturing mother; the supreme mother of the world; and the ferocious, defiant goddess to the young girl who’s in a state of sexual pleasure; the widow; and the violence of how we see Kali when she is at her fiercest. These ten versions play out in an older photographic work made between 2004 and 2013, where I worked with a dancer, Anusha Pillay. We’ve worked together since 2004, so there’s also something about collaborative practice and a looking / relooking / reshooting of a single person over time.

The tongue was important in that photographic work too. It hung from her waist, as a kind of exaggerated clitoris, but Mother Tongues is about Stellenbosch; thinking about the space as a battleground. Thinking about land and ownership and who has the right to enter that land, to exist on that land, to farm that land… I say battleground because the story of Kali is that she enters a battleground when another goddess is trying to kill a demon, but he is granted a boon that, for every drop of his blood that touches the earth, another one of him is born. Out of frustration, this goddess, Durga, opens her third eye and Kali springs forth and sticks her tongue out onto the battlefield and laps up the blood. Then the demon is able to be killed. So the tongue is quite specific to the the battleground, Kali’s outstretching of it conjures the battleground.

Whenever I make these works, the tongue sits low, as if it is about to lap from the ground. Here (Mother Tongues), the number ten was important, but as you see on the left, one tongue sits slightly apart. It’s also made of a different material — thread — while the others are made with fabric. It’s is a very slight demarcator. The gap between it and the others is a bit bigger. I see it/her as the Kali leading the other nine women, but without there being any hierarchy. One doesn’t sit higher than the other, or in front of the other, but rather, alongside – in solidarity. The difference is simply marked by the gap and the material. As women we charge together on an equal platform. There is no leader. The repetition of these bodies on the field becomes a centre of power, as opposed to the single figure.

SC: I’m drawn to your description of multiplicity — that Kali can be all of these things at once. Without knowing the backstory you’ve just described, I read this gap as being a kind of glitch, in the same way that Kamyar’s audio has these moments of pause. One of the books that I’ve been reading while writing about this exhibition is Brandon LaBelle’s Sonic Agency (2018). Excess is something that he brings to the fore, but I like his description of sound as a migratory form. So it leaves the mouth, it travels, and as a listener I can receive that sound but it also extends beyond me. It keeps moving. It exceeds me, or in his words, ‘unsettles and exceeds arenas of visibility,’ gets beneath the skin. There are two slightly lengthly quotes that I want to refer to here too, because I feel like they’re important. The one is that sound enables ‘strained articulations or actions to gather momentum and to take up residence within a multiplicity of territories or languages.’ It’s like a Trojan horse, which feels applicable in your reference to Stellenbosch as a battleground, but considered quite simply as this muscle that shapes / articulates / gives form to one’s breath, to words, or as the organ through which things get absorbed, taken in, there’s also a degree of intimacy attached to it. And here I think about another quote from LaBelle, about how sound as vibration is able to ‘shudder the articulated and delineated forms of sociality, cohering instead around the deep matters and shared atmospheres often supporting more intimate relations.’ That idea of intimacy or deep matter, the untameable or uncontrollable aspect of the voice, is felt in your audiowork, Kamyar. Even in a context like this, when you’re nervous and your voice starts to wobble… It says a lot. But Kamyar, I wanted to ask, because it only came up after I’d invited you to show work and we discussed the audiowork, was the particular choice in text. There was this interesting overlap that I wasn’t aware of at the time. If you could maybe talk a bit about that?

KB: The most difficult part of the project was finding these documents. Speaking to most people in Cape Town and in South Africa, not a lot of people knew about this history. There was this erasure that occurred through Afrikaner nationalism — this illusion that neglected to keep the history of Arabic-Afrikaans alive. That was one side of it. The other is that a lot of the families within these Muslim communities, who have these documents, don’t really want to show or give them away. Most are religious texts, and so they’re sacred. They’d rather keep it within the family than give them out, for fear that they could get erased again. I was lucky to gather a bunch of documents through different families, as well as the National Library in Cape Town, some of which had Arabic-Afrikaans and the transliteration in Roman characters. I showed them to Inshaaf, because I wanted to see how somebody who speaks Afrikaans and can read Arabic might read Arabic-Afrikaans. I was curious to hear what it sounds like for someone to read Arabic-Afrikaans. I gave her a few texts, and she actually found this text that included Roman characters. It is a religious text but it doesn’t speak directly to the Qu’ran. Rather, there are these teachings about behaviour, particularly menstruation — when you’re on your menstrual cycle, what are the things you should do, and what are the things you should not do. So she chose that text because it had both the Arabic-Afrikaans and the Roman characters, so she could understand what the text was saying, but also because she could relate to it. She started reading that text, and I recorded that. Initially I had no idea. It’s not like I chose that text, because I can read Arabic writing but I can’t understand Afrikaans, and I didn’t know what the text was saying. For me it was interesting that the text was explaining that, and that she chose that text to read.

SC: I don’t understand it either, so once you told me what it was about, it was hard to tell if this instruction was something that was useful, helpful, policed… If it was a form of rote learning where you’re putting something to memory so that you can say it back, and those things get absorbed. There was something interesting about her choice of text and how it overlaps with Reshma’s work; the drive to not be overdetermined from without, to be policed, to find a transformative space of agency…

There are two authors that I keep returning to. The one is Carli Coetzee, her book Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid (2013), which Nonto introduced me to. There’s one example where she’s talking about English in South Africa, and how there’s this puritanical view, at least within monolingual English communities: that we don’t think of English as being inflected with the locale, or how those who speak English in South Africa don’t necessarily speak the same English as those in the UK. It’s different. Alongside that, LaBelle writes of how the sonic can ‘return to the dominant order or the master tongue its own performative grammars and narratives, yet reshaped by an altogether different rhythm, an errant migrating repetition that may sound out alternative futures.’ In both of your work, difficulty, and working from that in-between space or blurring the lines — it has that kind of effect.

RC: It’s not just about a singular kind of language, or a singular English, because even in South Africa there are many Englishes. That is both racial and geographic… Pebo’s show that’s on at The Point of Order (TPO) now, is also thinking about the complexity of so many intersections in a singular space, and I think that language is one of those things; English becomes almost multi-vocal, actually. There’s a code-switching that happens. If I’m speaking to someone in Actonville, where I grew up, versus someone at Wits, versus a dance student, I’m speaking different languages, different Englishes. I’m code-switching all the time. When I think about my practice, the struggle — and I call it a struggle because after twenty years I still have not figured out how to move past this space — is trying to translate the two dominant languages in my practice: visual art and dance. The first is located in the painterly, sculptural, photographic, and always read through the lens of contemporary art. The second in tradition, coding, and historical references that make no sense in Southern Africa, or at least when it exists in its so called pure form. The meeting ground between these two spaces has been my struggle. The work continues to be made through that struggle, in the hope that eventually, before I die, I will find how those languages come together. In my mind and body they are one, but when they come out and exist in the world — how they look in the world; how they are experienced in the world (who are these audiences who take them in?) —there are two very different audiences, and when they do come to that space, what do they get from the different kinds of coding. I’m interested in that; in how the work is rendered legible to them, but also how confused they are about it. I don’t believe that it’s my role to make it right, but I’m interested in that, and my own failure in trying to code-switch in ways that are legible to both at the same time.

SC: Carli Coetzee writes about an awareness of the different contexts from which and to which we speak. She draws on the example of Sam Thlalo Raditlhalo giving a lecture on the work of Prof. Es’kia Mphahlela in an English speaking department at the University of Cape Town, and this constant signalling or placement — his use of the word ntate when addressing this audience, and how it signifies an affiliation that exists beyond the confines of the room that those who are present do not necessarily have access to. That also comes across in the work, your use of words that I for one can’t understand, or that it’s coded in a way that’s inaccessible to me.

RC: Just like the word ‘yoni.’ We don’t fully understand it. I don’t think vulva is the correct translation, but it’s the closest. There’s a spiritual depth to the word that we don’t actually know how to translate into English, so there’s the failure of English too, right?