Exploring the Space In Between with Hemali Khoosal.
For our Spaces Issue cover, Art & Culture Editor Shameelah Khan explores the concepts of belonging, being in-between and going back and forth with multi-disciplinary artist Hemali Khoosal.
THE LONG ROAD
Growing up, Lenasia, a well-known predominantly Indian area in Johannesburg, had always felt like a place far away, “in the distant lands,” I would always say. And the truth of the matter is that Lenasia is, in fact, far away. If you have never been there, imagine a really (really) lengthy stretch of road that starts at one point and ends at another, and then you appear in Lenz, as it is more famously known. Here you are met with the only Trade Route mall, colours, a variety of spice shops, material shops, really good Indian food (worth the trek, I would say) and a variety of temples, mosques and churches.
The road to Lenasia was long, but it was never too complicated. Once you entered the stretch, the tar-meets-sandy path took you there and it was very difficult to miss the turnoff when you knew it was up ahead. One word springs to mind when I think about the great trek and the one road in, one road out that was Lenasia:
LINEARITY
Navigating and negotiating that linearity is Hemali Khoosal, a multi-disciplinary artist currently based in Johannesburg but soon venturing off to complete her masters in London. As a child, moving between the linearity that was her school in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg to her home in Lenasia, seeded the explorations of Hemali’s creative imaginarium of a world. From a tender age she was encouraged by her parents to take art classes and foster her artistic spirit.
'You don’t really belong anywhere, so maybe you belong everywhere, she says'
Between her positionality that she held in her schools and the one she held in her home, Khoosal began to daydream her space in between. Being both an insider and outsider at the same time is how Hemali would describe her experience of place between Lenasia and the world beyond it. It is a movement of a back and forthness, and “you don’t really belong anywhere, so maybe you belong everywhere” she says. After a three-year detour of studying dentistry she decided to walk a new path as she stepped into the world of fine arts, printmaking and visual work at the University of Witwatersrand.
BELONGING
In many ways, Khoosal’s work begins with the notion of place and belonging. She builds layers of dreams, stories, imaginative spaces and dives deep into the understanding of the circular ; a rather fascinating realm of her work in direct conversation to that of linearity. I suggest that the space “In between '' or rather, the movement between linearity and circularity is where Khoosal finds her art emerge.
The core interests in her work is premised on people, human-interaction and documenting these “lives lived” in unique ways and forms. She uses a quaint expression for it: “My work is materially experimental and I play with different material to document and archive.” I would consider her work both experimental and experiential. It’s here- in the experiment, in the circular, in the looking and being looked at, in the learning and un-learning, the care, the time and the documenting - that Hemali creates from. Her mediums include photography, installation, printmaking, drawing, painting and video and can be further explored here.
"[There] was always a mutual understanding of being from an 'elsewhere' and a shared 'otherness.'"
Even though Khoosal is an expressionist artist in a nuanced way through multiple mediums, her focus is on herself as a visual artist and in particular, her work with video and story-intersections. In fact, when I first encountered her work, it was her visual work that drew me in, her ability to capture a landscape, a language and the gentleness of her engagement with the camera and its gaze on communities. Her dynamic and experimental approach to film is a fascinating, thought provoking, and visceral exploration of ideas and realities.
ELSEWHERE AND OTHERNESS
Parallel Entropy, shot across France and Croatia, is a set of short films peeking into the lives of strangers’ realities. Khoosal writes that ‘it is an embodiment of moments in which people from different backgrounds and places find common ground in their lived experiences. The project evolved from me walking around Strasbourg, having informal interviews with people I met. What began as organic chats with strangers during daily encounters unfolded into a few video works. Because I, too, was foreign to the setting, the baseline with many of the first and second generation migrants I met was always a mutual understanding of being from an 'elsewhere' and a shared 'otherness.' This positionality allowed me to explore dispossession and belonging, cultural and linguistic differences, as well as forms of discrimination that people had faced as a result of their 'otherness.'’
Watch it here
Much of her journey as a creative and a visual artist was unearthed during her time on exchange at Haute École des Arts du Rhin, in Strasbourg. In many ways, this is where she began identifying more with the space that filmmaking could provide her with. Thrust into the deep end in France, Khoosal had to put her basic French to good use and walk through the streets, engaging with the community, exploring space, language and barriers.
"As a young woman of colour, Khoosal believes in the power of dreaming."
“Towards the end of my few months in and around areas of France, I was pre-empting certain questions and interactions, and also expecting others to show a desire to find familiarity in me. I began to play games with it, asking people to guess where I am from instead of answering immediately. Ultimately, realising my relative position to others can not be accounted for by just one moment. There is no single locus of me questioning why some feel they belong and some do not, although some identifiable experiences accelerate my understanding and interest in this. These are ongoing inquisitions I have been circling back to in my head with each new trigger. The same goes for many others I mull over and work through within my art. I am aware that a general pattern is emerging, but usually only in retrospect can I identify it. This circularity of thought is something both important and fascinating to consider. Not only when thinking about idea-formation, but also when thinking about learning.”
Khoosal’s video work makes a commentary on memory, meaning and fragmentary moments. Her interests are multilayered and she unearths these interconnected narratives so eloquently through the lens of her camera. Her works explore themes of fragmentation, non-linearity, reflection and mindmapping. She engages, on a deeper and cosmic level, that of the fleeting, the ephemeral, the iterations of touch, sensuality, embodiment and movements-of-light.
THE NEXT ROAD
As a recipient of The Bag Factory’s Young Womxn Studio Bursary, Hemali Khoosal in collaboration with Cheriese Dilrajh presented their work in September 2021, entitled In Passing. The joint exhibition explores the complexities of movement and migration. "The artists started an oral histories project based in Fordsburg and Mayfair. Through recording conversations with people from these areas, they explored the layering of experiences of displacement. Their audio-visual installation focuses on the dynamic between ex-residents who were forcibly removed during the Group Areas Act, and people who have migrated from other countries more recently. The project reveals underlying past histories and current realities."
Khoosal explains that her “residual relationship” with Fordsburg, and her family’s experience of being fragmented from the area, meant that working in the space evoked some deeply personal feelings. Khoosal shares that her intention to understand and reveal this “space of many subspaces" has been instrumental in allowing her to see herself reflected in the stories that the team have documented. Her experimental video work in the exhibition stretched across the room angled through light, contour and at an intersection, as if two colliding worlds were pulling you into it. Again, an 'in-betweenness' resurfaces…
As a young woman of colour, Khoosal believes in the power of dreaming. It is not merely dreaming simply to have dreams, but to actualise your dreams as a form of non-linearity, a new path and perhaps a new way of being. On a final note, I have thought of many ways to close this article and to name that at a young age, Khoosal’s work is revolutionary and as it unfolds, so does she… When I think of her oeuvre of multi-disciplinary mediums, including her work with light, fragmentation, and circularity, it’s clear that her cinematic languaging is imaginative, vast and explorative. Her playfulness, sincerity and boldness in her work and her conscious ability to speak to people to find their true, essential story takes me to a line by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish:
“On this earth is that which deserves life”
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