Tamil Archive Project

Tamil Archive Project (TAP) is a decentralized artist collective founded in Scarborough. Home of Tamil Futures, Bambaram, Archive Division, and Healing Arts Dinner Circle. Since 2016, we centre communal care through combining art creation, knowledge sharing, digital culture, and archival practices into accessible events for the community .

Bambaram is a group of artists and coders from across the globe at TAP focusing on the intersections of art and technology in racialized communities. By investigating the evolving identity of art, they attempt to understand, reinterpret, and reclaim tradition, ritual, and art through their work.

Kolams are intricate patterns drawn by women on the front entrance of their homes as a way to mark occasions such as Tamil New Year on April 14th. An ancient art form combining advanced drawing skills and mathematics, kolams are rituals passed down through generations that take a lifetime to master. In the diaspora, they are a disrupted practice lost to the past. Each imperfect kolam by Aarati Akkapeddi, Alex Mahesvaran, Luxvna Uthayakumar, Vinutha Vasanthi Venkatesh takes over the screen in an attempt to reconnect to ritual, reclaim public spaces, and celebrate matrilineal histories.

Luxvna Uthayakumar

Creating this kolam was a process – it started out with the intention of using scans of objects and Adobe Illustrator to mock up a pattern. What I discovered through using the scans and the program was that I stretched the traditional way of making a kolam so far, in so many highly processed ways, only for the familiarity to come back around again. Presented on the gallery wall are the outlines that Adobe Illustrator created with my scans, something eerily reminiscent to the geometry of a traditional kolam.

Vinutha Vasanthi Venkatesh

Thinking about recreating and re-adapting the concept of a kolam through a digital medium that would allow me to create a deeper bond with the artform, I decided to use light. In this collage I adapted the process of long-exposure photography to capture 11 kolams as light drawings. As I ritualistically traced and retraced the kolams I had drawn on the floor with a small light held in my palm I found myself mimicking the actions of traditional kolam making and memorizing the intricacies of the patterns. 

Aarati Akkapeddi

These are four different kolams. Encrypted text for each kolam is clockwise starting from the top left: “06 01 1921”, “10 14 1938”, “11 06 1965”, “12 29 1992”. These are the birthdays in chronological order of my paternal grandmother, my maternal grandmother, my mom, and myself.

Alex Mahesvaran

This kolam is a visual representation of the word and popular toy called Bambaram in Tamil. The repetition of this word though the interconnecting shapes and lines form together the image, also commonly known as a spinning top in English. 

Vithurry Sivaloganathan

Tamil Archive Project’s bambaram members created a kolam on display for a day. The journey started with a grandmother in Tamil Nadu teaching her grandchild Vinutha in Texas to hand draw patterns, then digitally translated by Alex in Scarborough, and then outer patterns drawn by Luxvna of Scarborough on a window in Parkdale, with the intricate inner patterns freehand by Vithurry of North York, and erased by Vasuki of Toronto. This kolam was to welcome the Tamil New Year and share our hope for better times with the surrounding community who had welcomed us into this space.

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mean body \ i absolutely know i exist / by nichola feldman-kiss

one 3D whole body laser scan — 360 inkjet prints cold mounted to Sintra PVC foam board 14.5 x 8” each, installation variable 95’sq 2001-2005

mean body (as in Standard) is a performance document and database of surface anthropometric data sets (3D body shape scans) that I created while a guest artist with the National Research Council of Canada (2001-2003 and 2004-2006).

Inspired by study of established human body databases such as the Visible Human Project¹ and CAESAR², I embarked on a performative process to establish my own body shape as a baseline for scientific research. This gesture was motivated to critically engage with certain oppressive cultural norms, standard and averages that have prevailed in the colonial west, especially since the birth of anthropology, ethnography and photographic technologies… read more

feldman-kiss works as an artist. They are interested in categorical systems, liminality and the dissonance of inbetweens where meaning is leaky, slippery, defiant, fugitive, violent and erotic too.

normals standards means bodies skins borders boundaries. rules limits margins. edges thresholds and horizons. language Classifications definitions discipline expectation roles. Species tribe caste creed status containers boxes and compartments. viewfinders lenses screens. Nation States island prisons security fences (Human) zoos. Anthropology Ethnography Photography. index and evidence and Museology too.

The things feldman-kiss makes result from focussed looking, chasing references, finding out. Burrowing through the network into curiously real and visceral worlds. Alice fell through the trembling liquid crystal, landed somewhere factual, palpable, sensate. feeling Movie-ish. Big Screen. VR for its strangeness but for that people are flesh, embodied narrative –olfactory on fire. Witness…

feldman-kiss submits to art as life and process to live by, aiming to work intuitively, sensually and from their animality as a conscious migratory creature of our earthly bed. They are conspicuously bodied. Their artworks deploy body as instrument. Fact, agent, material. The body embodiment continuum. They do not create with the topic of bodies as purpose or intention. feldman-kiss’ work is not conceptual in that way. Their artworks are stills for persistent, unsettling and thorney awakenings of life enslaved to their times. Native of nowhere on Colonized land, mammalian. Historic / contemporary. digital. informational, touchless, late-binary. urban, Capitalist, millenarian (end times). They create with whatever surfaces then sticks around to assert itself.

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Celestial Throne by Rah Eleh

Celestial Throne is a two -channel video that consists of two screen or projections that seamlessly interect. The video parodies the tropes endemic to a classic game show, specifically Jeopardy!, where clues are provided and contestants guess the answers. The clues in the game show expose coded internet dialect, iconography, memes, and aesthetics used by far right hate groups to disseminate the movement’s political ideologies, spread messages of animosity and to lure recruits. The characters are all performed by the artist and they deconstruct racial stereotypes, while the videos are a pointed critique of far-right internet extremism. A glossary of terms can be found on the artist’s website

Rah Eleh is a PhD candidate at Die Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. Rah’s work has been exhibited extensively internationally at spaces including Venice Biennale (Palazzo Mora), Vogele Kultur Zentrum (Pfaiffikon, Switzerland), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Museum London, Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, Massachusetts), Miami Art Basel, Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem, Netherlands), and the Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, Greece). She has been the recipient of numerous awards including long-listed 2023 Sobey Art Awards, Chalmers Arts Fellowship, SSHRC Canada Graduate and Doctoral scholarships, and several Canada Council for the Arts, Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council grants. She has been awarded many residencies including the ONX Studio (NYC, 2024 ), Koumaria Residency (Greece, 2016), Studio Das Weisse Haus (Vienna, 2014) and the ArtSlant Georgia Fee Residency (Paris, 2014). 

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Virtual ISLANDs by Olivia Mc Gilchrist

Virtual ISLANDs explores the relationship between the experience of virtual immersion in VR and the physicality of being submerged, offering viewers audio-visual interpretations of the ebb and flow of water around them. The project invites a reading of VR’s virtual space foregrounding submersion alongside immersion, to highlight the relation between water and fluid identities, inspired by my dual Caribbean and European heritage. In earlier versions of Virtual ISLANDS, I explored the affordance of my white privilege through the lens of hybridity by visualizing my body coming in and out of the artwork’s visual plane. In Virtual ISLANDs’ current VR experience, the viewer is placed in an aquatic scene where they can interact with the moving figure of Newfoundlander aerial performer Keely Whitelaw. Her choreographed performance portrays a gestural response to an original composition by Newfoundlander electronic composer Kasey Pocius, inspired by a virtual experience of being underwater.

Olivia Mc Gilchrist (she / her) is a white French-Jamaican multimedia artist and doctoral candidate exploring how colonial legacies extend their reach to Virtual Reality (VR) technology. She works with video, multimedia installation and VR both as an artist and a consultant on interdisciplinary and audio-visual performance based projects.

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