ambient audio: works by Yudi Sewraj

Video Works of Yudi Sewraj: Endurance

I, The Viewer, take a seat in front of the monitor.
I sit down. And when I watch the work of Yudi Sewraj,
I am compelled to make a commitment to the act of viewing.

Yudi Sewraj’s body of work to date gives the viewer permission to stay and has evolved within the video art tradition to examine the possibilities of duration. However, Sewraj is inclined to take this one complex step further, to allow the viewer to engage his active subject. The endurance of Sewraj’s subject and subsequently the artist’s own body of work reveal the key with which to unlock a respective value.

Yudi Sewraj’s work enables the viewer to inhabit the subject long enough to understand endurance is not the means to an end. Endurance is the means. The end, much like the answer to rhetorical question, is extraneous.

Challenges to traditional forms of media narrative are so few audiences increasingly fail to nurture resistance against the primacy of The End. Beverle Houston so eloquently articulated “[by viewing commercial television and cinema] we have learned to love the phantasmagoric hope of improvement and control on which obsession is based” 1. Culturally entrenched valorization of closure in traditional scripts creates important spaces for experimentation. Sewraj occupies this space with a honed talent anchored in the storyteller’s tradition and exceptionally articulated in video art text.

His single-channel works beginning with A Box of His Own and ambitious installations ending with A Cold Night in February act as destinations. The trajectory of Yudi Sewraj’s practice to date is both profound and intimate. To make the most of both these qualities endurance is required.

With a practice borne of the legitimate place in the identity politics revolution in Canadian media art, Sewraj grasped clearly and early that “the reality of [minorities] can never be exhausted, but as a strategy its ends become limited…There is indeed, no small, worn-out subject, but only narrow predictable representations” 2 . Cultural identity as subject within Sewraj’s practice is primarily a literal and figurative point of departure for both the artist and spectator.

His works from 1997-2005 demonstrate Sewraj’s commitment to exploration a commitment so clearly articulated in A Box of His Own. In this important work so clearly rooted in the traditions of identity politics. He states his identity perhaps not for the benefit of the artist rather that of his audience.

Sewraj’s work is configured in practices. Composed at the cultural level by ideas, attitudes and values; at the emotional level by texts of intuitive wonder; and at the physical level by movements, postures and spaces.
The artist’s performance and adept video treatment thereof reflects endurance. Yudi Sewraj’s endurance. It begins with odyssey: departure, arrival and return (A Box of His Own, 1997), transmutations from man to beast (Rut, 1998), digging of tunnels (The Middle Distance, 2000), the hauling of rocks (The Weight of the Sun and the Moon, 2001), and the meticulous sealing of abodes (Apartment Theory, 2001).

Geographic location and endurance are once again at the core of the playful Rut. The Montreal artist’s hibernatory practice is painfully literal but must absolutely not be dismissed on this feeble basis. On the heels of the widely viewed and acclaimed A Box of His Own, Rut is an important work of an artist seeking to emerge from the context of identity politics into the broader arena of contemporary art. This work provides a strong and important indication that Sewraj’s unwillingness to take his subject too seriously disarms while at the same time unearths his subject’s ability to bear confines dictated by circumstance.

The Middle Distance is a poetic imaging kneads the boundaries of endurance and performance art into a viewing experience permitting dalliances with the sublime. This seminal work is the moment at which Sewraj begins to demonstrate a particular sophistication in his communication of the emotional.

Still anchored in the narrative tradition, it is with The Middle Distance that Sewraj employs and shares an established confidence along an arduous path from traditional articulations to traditions with a stronger relationship to exploration and discovery. At every moment of The Middle Distance the aesthetic elegance complements the viewer’s emotional connection with the subject.

Work following A Box of His Own, embraces the physical tradition of silent film; most specifically, The Weight of the Sun and the Moon. The physical performance itself harkens the torturous tasks assigned to prisoners of war but the physical endurance is affectionate. Sewraj’s Chaplin-esque hat accentuates tragicomedy in his gait generated by the weight the subject bares. Given this infusion of tender intention greater power is given to the function of endurance.

The marriage of prose and endurance art creates an expression that is at once poetic and firmly grounded in a playful physicality. There is a sensuality present given the role of the body, the vehicle through which Sewraj is laid bare – the artist is the subject.

Apartment Theory, Sewraj’s final single-channel prior to his practice’s departure into the realm of installation, permits a recurring view into the domestic life of our subjects. The presence of Sewraj’s partner, artist Monique Moumblow, strikes a note of realism which toys delightfully with the viewer’s anticipation and expectation of gaining greater insight into the intention - and perhaps life of the artist.

The construction of spaces created in early work reveals the potential for ordinary spaces to act as magic realism (in the tradition of Garcia-Marquez) portals accessed via labour and endurance. This is worth consideration given the shift from single-channel to installation in Sewraj’s work produced from 2001-2005.

With installations, the audience is no longer witness to the labour so central to Sewraj’s early work. Now it must be contextually understood by the viewer rather than performed by the subject. This continuum manifests most effectively in A Cold Night in February, a heart-wrenching projection in which the viewer must take a seat on the living room couch at the end defined by markers on the floor. Once seated the image of a man weeping at the opposite end of the couch appears on the screen in front. The viewer/subject is compelled to but can never comfort the weeping man at the other end of the living room couch because to shift from the markers is to trigger the fade of the weeping man.

Sewraj’s subject no longer performs feats of endurance. Perhaps he is too tired to do anything but weep. Perhaps he mourns the loss of a box of his own. Perhaps his disappearance is an active refusal of comfort. All of these conclusions are extraneous.

From his early to latest work completed in 2005, the artist still creates sets of refuge for his subject – only now his box is not his own it is shared with the viewer. The viewer has been invited by the artist to act as subject. And so we enter this and read Sewraj’s lyrical texts.

Sewraj’s work is founded in the real and the imagined bearing no relationship to fantasy, per se, but to what is possible. Poetic interaction with environmental elements: earth, stone, water, the sun and the moon conjure a sense of refuge as well as a sense of purpose. His employ of media technology opens a door to his world of the imagined full of possibility.

Why would I, The Viewer, want to leave?

1 Beverle Houston, “Television and Video Text: A Crisis of Desire,” Resolutions, p. 111-122.
2 Trinh T. Minh-ha, “The World as Foreign Land,” When the Moon Waxes Red (New York: Routledge, 1991); p. 190.
3 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York, Routledge, 1993).

-- Dana Inkster, 2005