Manju Sharma, Please keep me with you at all times, 2019, reading-performance, 30min.

During the performance, I read a part of my written work and move through the available space and among the audience leaving uncomfortable silences that mirror how women of colour are often silenced by institutional structures still in place today. My reading is interrupted by the suitcase which plays the words ‘Please keep me with you at all times. Do not leave me unattended. Any of us left unattended will be removed without warning and maybe destroyed’. The interruption of the sound installation, during the reading, mirrors frictions of safe spaces and trying to go against the classifications of opposed identities and reveals the emotions of hurt and shame one feels before one grows bitter through the cultures of domination and exclusion.

The interruption of the sound installation, during the reading, mirrors frictions of safe spaces and reveals the emotions of hurt and shame.

The suitcase represents the baggage that we carry around with us, baggage as in cultural heritage, and the miss-match of cultures. It addresses the importance to unpack the baggage that we carry. Growing up in Britain there was always a continuous threat of bombs lefts in bags and other objects; in the past from the IRA, in the present day from so-called terrorists associated with Islam and now violence’s against the flow of migrants. The suitcase represents the political landscape that I grew up in, and takes us further to the geo-political climate in which we live in today.

Suitcase installation  https://youtu.be/yLQMe4FI56U