By Kodie Cherrille (The Cascade) – Email
If you’ve walked past the S’eliyemetaxwtexw art gallery in B136 recently, you might have heard the delicate sweep of ambient tones exuding from the room. If you’ve looked towards the source of that sound, you might have seen frenzied time-lapses of highway traffic and a bustling UFV, cutting to slower moments: water slowly dripping onto stones; a khanda dangling on a string under a rear-view mirror; and a Sikh woman, wearing a golden salwar suit, almost smiling.
And if you’ve looked inside the gallery, you will have been part of (Mis)Interpretation: Sikh Feminisms in Representations, Texts, and Lived Realities. With photos of the five Sikh articles of faith, segments of the Bara Mah, and the symbol of Ikk Oan Kar (typically translated as “there is one God”), the exhibition offers a window into Sikh spirituality.
But more importantly, with the assertion that God must not “be reduced to any exclusionary concept or any intimidating male symbol,” and with the welcoming statement urging us to “(re)raise the textual and practical meaning of Sikh feminist thought and understanding,” (Mis)Interpretation is an examination of what it means to be a Sikh woman today, and invites a feminist interpretation of the Sikh faith.
The exhibition is curated by the Centre of Indo-Canadian Studies (CICS) director Satwinder Bains and coordinator Sharanjit Sandhra, and includes camerawork from UFV student Rishma Johal and alumna Suvi Bains.
Four segments of Bara Mah Tukhari are displayed, each of which has four separate translations. The Barah Mah is a part of the Sikh scripture, the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, and synthesizes love and spiritual devotion in a poem based on the 12 months.
Implied in these translations is that there is more than one way to read the text.
In an interview with CBC, Satwinder Bains described the intent behind the exhibition.
“We wanted to look at the realities of young women and their lives, both through a faith perspective, and their work, play, and families,” said Bains.
“Like all faiths mostly in the world, they’re very much prescribed from a male perspective,” she continued. “My daily living, I try very hard to incorporate my ideas into how I interpret my faith.”
Next to the scripture segments are photographs and paragraph-length stories of local Sikh women, each of whom describe their lived realities — how they interpret their faith from a feminist perspective, while also preserving the virtues prescribed by their spirituality.
“My belief in equality, equity, humanity, and social justice informs my work at large and is derived from a spiritual understanding,” reads Johal’s statement.
On October 29 at the Reach Gallery Museum, Suvi Bains will exhibit her latest work, Kesh, which examines the article of faith of the same name — Sikh men’s unshorn hair — with a similar intent to examine faith in a feminist light. (Mis)Interpretation will continue to be on display until October 20.
