“Motherland/Other Land” or Des Pardes is the newest exhibit at The Reach Gallery Museum. Featured in four different languages, Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, and English, the gallery is accessible to the diversity of people belonging to the Fraser Valley. The breadth and large-scale collaborative nature of the exhibit makes it the first of its kind, and seeks to represent the South Asian community and explore their contributions, challenges, and successes in cultivating a new home overseas.
I had the chance to get a one-on-one tour from The Reach Gallery’s Curator of Art and Visual Culture, Kelley Tialiou. Tialiou explained that the showcase had a prime focus on community engagement and involved a lot of community research and archival work. The collaborative nature highlights how museums are changing, by shifting the position of authority, “this idea that museums would make an exhibition on behalf of a community is inherently flawed,” she said.
All six sections of the gallery were tied together by the theme of the matriarch which begins in the title itself. Tialiou emphasized how important women are in preserving and disseminating traditions to future generations. She spoke to the matriarchs as “key contributors to resilience through their many roles, and how unsung, often these roles are.”
The central mural, “Motherland / Mother Hand” was a collaborative effort led by Sandeep Johal, and inspired the designs for the rest of the exhibit. Tialou stated how they were “keen to avoid creating a visual language that reinforces some of those stereotypes of visual culture,” and incorporated common iconography from the South Asian diaspora, such as Corning Ware, spices, a lion, and an array of eclectic patterns. Johal’s contemporary renditions of traditional South Asian culture explore what belonging to two cultures looks like.
Continuing to challenge traditional notions of museum spaces, Des Pardes was an immersive and hands-on experience. With videos, interactive touch screens, and an arts station informed by the nuances of the South Asian communities of Abbotsford and the Fraser Valley.
I also interviewed Rajnish Dhawan, a UFV associate professor of English and a participant in Des Pardes. Dhawan offered me some insights into the impact of this kind of project, “…we saw a different kind of world… to see the struggle and to be a part of the continuum of the migration history, that is something which I find is valuable.”
The Des Pardes exhibit organized and presented by The Reach Gallery Museum is an in depth exploration of the rich history of the South Asian communities in the Fraser Valley from settlement to present day. I highly recommend everyone to go and visit Des Pardes, on until June 15, 2024, and hopefully develop a new appreciation for the history of the Fraser Valley, and the groups that call it home.
