On Belonging
Collaborative projects by Lois Bielefeld and Nirmal Raja
Reaching through 5 1/2 yards, 8497 miles
Artist Statement
Raja moved to the United States 28 years ago while Bielefeld is a Milwaukee native. In 2016 with xenophobia and racism on the rise, the artists felt compelled to examine how initial perception of the ‘other’ occurs. Raja has amassed over 150 saris but living in Milwaukee she rarely wears them due to both internalized social pressures and practicality. She started wearing the sari as an act of resistance against conformity and reclaiming the right to look different and yet belong. While wearing one of her saris, she overtly performs difference and traverses Milwaukee’s urban landscape as Bielefeld documents her movement. They negotiate both mundane and institutional places of power, examining Milwaukee as place. In this work, Milwaukee can be seen as representing any mid-sized city today in America. A social experiment and performance, the work has become a statement of occupying space.
What is recorded | What is remembered
Artist statement
What is recorded | What is remembered responds to an engraved timeline of Wisconsin and America’s history on Milwaukee’s Riverwalk. Raja made a rubbing of sections of this timeline on 30 yards of organdi. This fabric became a prop for performance based photo and video works that bring attention to our fraught relationship to history. With an implicit understanding that history is written by victors (usually male) and with plenty of gaps and errors, Bielefeld and Raja made a sequence of 12 still photographs, 2 video installations, and an audio archive. In the 3-channel video "What is Recorded/ What is Remembered. 2019" ritual actions are performed with the fabric by 19 women, through which history is visualized as a membrane that connects, divides, filters and binds. They choreographed sequences that evoke our conflicted relationship with history. They made a deliberate choice to give prominence to women from diverse backgrounds that stand in for often-marginalized communities. A further examination of history and women’s voices is heard in an on-going audio archive called "In their words.”
In their words. 2019. Audio Archive.
Lois Bielefeld (she/her/hers)
Lois Bielefeld is a queer series-based artist working in photography, audio, video, and installation. Her work continually asks the question of what links routine and ritual to the formation of identity and personhood and the development of meaning-making. These social studies center on memory, identity, gender, community, and personal space. Bielefeld just returned to Milwaukee after living in San Francisco Bay area and Chicago.
Nirmal Raja (she/her/hers)
Nirmal Raja is an interdisciplinary artist whose work deals with concepts of displacement and cultural negotiation. Notions of temporality, memory and change as related to these overarching themes are explored through extensive experimentation with materials and processes. Raja currently resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.