at Niru Ratnam with Jan Agha

Jan Agha and Roo Dhissou both make work that playfully complicates ideas around cultural authenticity. Both provide maverick strategies as to how to navigate cultural histories from the perspective of the diaspora. Their works often seemingly draw on specific histories, but in fact in different ways each artist complicates that by picking, choosing and putting together disparate cultural references. The result is less about claiming cultural authenticity but more about negotiating a transient, self-defined subject position that subtly champions the fragmentary, playful, overlapping and improvisatory.



Jan Agha makes paintings, works on paper and ceramic sculptures that create a personal visual vocabulary populated by outsiders, nomads, deviants and tricksters. Agha was born in Pakistan but there is no singular overriding culturally-specific framework to his work. Instead Agha is deliberately eclectic. He cites sources and inspirations that range from Persian academic painting, cave paintings, Hindu and Buddist visual iconography through to Francis Bacon and Goya. In this sense his iconography might be understood through the concept of the trickster. This figure has been utilised by cultural theorists to identify characters in literature and art that have subversive, humourous and disrupting traits. Examples include pranksters, gamblers, thieves, journeyers and trespassers, with the emphasis on producing a mode of subversion of colonial authority that is more petty criminal than noble freedom fighter. The trickster is an opportunistic figure that manipulates conventionally accepted signs in order to subvert authority or bring at least bring it into question with others. Agha's paintings are populated by these figures, lost in their own Quixotic quests, fighting real or imagined enemies or staring down oblivion. These might the guardians or a ruined culture or demigods heralding of a new world-order of cheerful chaos.



Roo Dhissou's work features religious objects associated with Hinduism and Sikhism that are sometimes mass-produced, sometimes unique and in one case, 'Shiva Lingam' (2021) made following instructions from YouTube. Dhissou made the latter despite the traditional Hindu stricture that as an unmarried woman she is not supposed to touch a shiva lingam. The object speaks both of a tradition and also breaking the rules around that tradition in an everyday fashion. What is at stake when cultural traditions can be warped using an internet tutorial? The cluster of small objects, placed low to the floor on wooden blocks, subtly question the notion of cultural authenticity as traditions get translated, half-forgotten and improvised in diasporas. Whilst Dhissou's homemade Shiva Lingam is deliberately transgressive, another Shiva Lingam entitled 'Shivling' (2021) is perhaps its counterpart in terms of assumed authenticity. It is a Narmada Stone that is regarded as one of the most sacred and powerful stones and is only found in one place in the world, the Narmada River, which is said to have sprung from the body of Lord Shiva. These stones are objects of worship and yet, these supposedly rare stones are widely available on the internet from Ebay or Etsy. Yet Dhissou's works are not a negative comment of this slide from the sacred to the commonplace through to the fake. Instead there seems an odd equivalence between the objects, an acceptance that cultural identity in the diaspora is negotiated between various inauthenticities and compromises.