Usha Seejarim is an artist who lives and works in Johannesburg. Usha is a South African of Indian heritage and was born in 1974 in Bethal, a small town in Mpumalanga. Usha works in various media, photographic and video, and makes assemblages of found objects. In her work Usha reflects her immediate surroundings and finds inspiration in the routines of everyday life. She uses the journey as methaphor for life and the metropolis as a metaphor for movement and transition.

Next to being an artist she has been teaching and lecturing at various institutions. Usha is also Weather Reporter and last April and May I (Rienke Enghardt) spent some time with her in Johannesburg.


R: Can you tell something about your work and your source of inspiration?

U: My works revolves around themes concerning issues of routine journey, time and memory, and transient space reoccur in my art making activities, as I often document details on fixed routes through video or photographs. Informed by my immediate physical environment, notions around narrative, context, displacement and illusion/reality surface as the process of making becomes as important or even more significant than the end product.

In a country where forced removals and relocation have resulted in the birth of many new routes (and roots), necessitating many to travel daily journeys from place of home to place of work, my work has explored representations of fixed routes. As I travel a fixed route daily between Lenasia (where I live, which was established as an Indian area south of Johannesburg during the Group Areas Act in the 50's, as occupants were forcedly removed from Johannesburg) and Johannesburg (where I work), on the M1 South, I am aware that this present day route exists as a result of a specific past history, and new history is constructed daily as many commuters travel over the tarred surface. I have explored the commuting of this route in various artworks; through the collection of bus tickets in cash ticket/ash ticket (1999). Photo documentations of this daily journey, and video works such as The Opposite of Illustration (1999), where car lights are recorded through a shaky rear view mirror of a moving vehicle, and Eight to Four (2001), where car shadows are recorded along the same route.

In a more recent work, as a search of my own identity as a South African of Indian heritage, I have interviewed elderly South African Indian citizens who are currently living in Lenasia. The final work (yet to be shown) is a three screened video projection installation with all these participants in conversation with each other.


R: What is in the past?

U: ... you know that every moment in the present becomes the past at the advent of every next moment. I think that the past represents a search, and looking back I become aware of my growth and development as a person, and as an artist. The past is also a foundation for the present and the future, but within the present, the past is also a space that allows for introspection and change.


R: What is happening now?

U: ... at this point, I feel more confident about the work that I am making. There seems to be a shift to a more conscious social concern within my work. There is also a figurative representation in my work now, which was always implied but never represented in previous works.

I am very conscious of change and flux. The present is not a constant, and therefore one has to move with it, therefore it is very difficult to say what is happening now, because now is never static, it is always moving.


R: What is in the future?

U: .... whatever is meant to be.


R: What is everlasting?

U: ....love.

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