Suture: Kobby Adi, Lydia Blakeley, Jala Wahid

About

‘Suture’, the opening exhibition at Niru Ratnam, brings together the work of three artists, Kobby Adi, Lydia Blakeley and Jala Wahid. The exhibition is loosely structured around the notion of suture. This is firstly with reference to the joining together of a cut into skin. And secondly in the way the cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall have used the term to suggest the mechanism in which an individual identifies with a particular subject position or group identity. In this latter sense an individual is ‘sutured’ to a particular discourse at a particular moment in time, and identity becomes less a fixed position and more of a continuous ongoing process.  Underlying both uses of the word is a suppressed violence or the always present possibility of rupture, so that the statement an individual makes or subject position they occupy depends as much on negation or refusal as it does on affirmation. To choose one position as yours is to implicitly break with other positions. Subject positions always have a certain precariousness about them.