Emerging artist Talia Ramkilawan is showing at this year's 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair Paris at Christie’s where she is represented by SEPTIEME Gallery. As media partner for the fair, Nataal highlights her as one-to-watch.

Born in Cape Town and raised by her single mother in Nelspruit, Ramkilawan returned to Cape Town in 2015 to major in sculpture at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Her work focuses on the trauma of dislocation and displacement she felt because of her South Asian identity. However, far from allowing the pertaining ideologies surrounding such an identity to dominate her, Ramkilawan uses her artworks to speak out and become a restorative tonic for her community.

“Attempting to find a process of healing through making led me to where I am now. I craved intimacy between what I was making and myself,” the artist explains. Her work uses portraiture to create a visual presence of the ‘Indian experience’ that disrupts linear narratives. “I place emphasis on exposing how trauma of the past resonates in the present,” she adds.

Ramkilawan has made strides in developing her technique in rug-hooking, and harnessing the quiet power that comes with simply sitting and sewing. She came across this process of using a punch needle to make a carpet on Youtube whilst researching traditional tapestries. Cleverly adapting this technique to the tools she had at her disposal - a crochet needle, wool and stretched hessian over a wooden frame - she has evolved the process into a unique medium of her own. “Weaving, working with wool and cloth is typically associated with womxn’s work and I found it so intriguing that I would be doing something internally so disruptive just by sitting in my apartment playing with wool all day,” she explains.

Weaving contemporary imagery into her tapestries, Ramkilawan breaks down the walls constructed through western dualities with pieces that both intend to shock and subvert the stereotypes of her lived experience as a queer Indian womxn. “I am looking at more everyday experiences as a post generation South Asian womxn and how I am navigating living with so many binaries - Indian, yet not Indian enough, a daughter, a friend, queer, brown, tired yet so much more to give.”

Ramkilawan is a member of the Kutti Collective, which formed through a mutual feeling of lack of belonging within the South Asian community in Cape Town. “The collective formed us - rather than we having formed it” she explains. “It’s our space, our representation, our empowerment and community. These struggles brought us together but the collective is not defined by our shared trauma, rather by our creative determination and support of each other despite it. We as individuals and as a whole are the strength.” The group provides support beyond the world of art, bestowing a refuge for people who are able to bear assurance and confidence.

The myriad layers woven into Ramkilawan’s tapestries are purposefully defiant, nodding towards social activism, asking us to critically evaluate our assumptions and the effects they perpetuate. They are able to illustrate rich diversity, with a resilience against common thought. “I want my work to help one feel empowered, to be held and that these can be felt simultaneously,” Ramkilawan concludes.

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair Paris edition at Christie’s runs from 20 - 23 January 2021. Find out more here

Words Xanthe Somers

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Published on 20/01/2021