Interview #202 — Jasmeet Kaur Sahi

by Fatima Measham

Jasmeet Kaur Sahi is a Melbourne-based artsworker. She currently takes care of public programming for Science Gallery Melbourne and is on the editorial team for the SAARI Collective. She previously worked for Melbourne Writers Festival and Footscray Community Arts Centre as a programmer and creative producer.

She has also written for the ABC, ArtsHub, Eureka Street, Southern Crossings, The Stella Prize, Peril Magazine and Portside Review, and taught non-fiction writing at RMIT University. Her favourite things are taking walks and pictures, getting her hands in the soil, cooking, and books.

Jasmeet Kaur Sahi speaks to Fatima Measham about curating arts experiences, capitalist constraints within the creative industry, and how to assert a sense of self in the colony.

I was thinking about how much you've worked in the background over the past several years, in various roles across different organisations. Most people who design programs or produce events don't tend to get the same profile as the artists they elevate. Yet their choices contribute to what gets regarded as culture. How have you approached your practice in that regard, and who inspires or informs the way you bring artists and audiences together?

In practice it is often the organisation that you work for that decides who comes through the doors, who the audiences are, and how we speak and connect with them. There are always principles and philosophies behind that, determined by the type of organisation one works for.

I've had the privilege of working for a few who attempt to centre the voices and experiences of the underserviced and underrepresented. In a way I have chosen to work for them for those reasons. Socially conscious work is important to me: work that is contextualised within society, speaks to the realities of people’s experiences, and seeks to create change or help us evolve.

Positionality is crucial. You cannot ignore who you are, where you are situated and come from, and what you bring to the table in the cultural and creative sector. To be quite honest, you can't and shouldn't ignore positionality in any sector. What this has meant for me is an attempt to understand my role as a settler on unceded lands of the First Peoples. For me this seeps into everything. How can it not?

What’s also influenced me is this country's position on those seeking asylum, its treatment of those who are seeking refuge, and the warped idea that multiculturalism is its success story, to be shown off to the rest of the world. I don't think it has arrived there yet. But it can—given the right people are allowed to make decisions and get us all there.

I’ve had the good fortune of finding friends, being employed by and working alongside people who have embodied these same ideas, and it is they who inspire me to work in a way that can be reflective of and respectful to the communities we live in.

Can you talk us through the considerations for curating a collective experience around the arts, literature and science under the unpredictable conditions of a pandemic?

It is tricky because a lot of it has had to move online. There are hybrid ways of doing it, where artists perform on-site with no audience, and it's livestreamed from there, or via panels or performances through online platforms.

I think the biggest consideration for me is to go by what the artist is feeling. That's how I’d like to work. I would like to centre their experience and the relationship with the artists first. Is there capacity? Does this feel right for what we want to achieve?

Because a lot of the time it's a very delicate balance with organisations and funders and sponsors, to deliver things in a particular calendar year while being a champion for the people who are actually going to do the work—the artists and/or the collaborators.

Those are some of the considerations. There are others. What are we trying to achieve? Who are we trying to reach? Is this something we need to talk about now? Is the audience that we want to reach keen on hearing this or seeing this or feeling this?

If you didn't have any other obstacles, how would you go about designing a program in the next year?

Most of my documents now, in my messy world, will have an option: if not IRL, what is the URL option? If I had my way, I guess I would frame artists as workers. During lockdowns, if other people get permits to work, I think there should have been permits for artists to perform in a COVID-safe way too. They can arrive at a venue where people are masked up, they're social distancing, where they can then perform.

I think that every work is essential. It's essential for the person. So we are aligning labour in a way, when we call it ‘essential work’: who is it essential to? Because my work is essential to me, right? As for artists, what is essential to them?

I wonder whether current circumstances have also opened up opportunities to those who otherwise might not have been able to reach a broad audience in traditional models.

I think every challenge is an opportunity; it depends on how we look at it. In this particular scenario, we can't meet in person, but we have a broader reach.

Where I work, we have an international group of nine galleries. There's no reason—OK, time difference aside—why I can't partner with my colleagues in Bengaluru. I have an event which is co-curated and presented with our colleagues in Atlanta, Venice, Rotterdam or Dublin. So I think it opens up a broader audience.

It can bring in a lot of people who might be hesitant to meet in real life, too. If COVID were gone, or we're all vaccinated and meeting in person, there will still be people who may not be comfortable. People who are neurodivergent. People who have their own challenges and their own journeys, who don't want to come out and be in public that way. We can learn from this, how we can make things more accessible, more fun, within constraints/restrictions.

But you know, artists know how to work within constraints. I'm not talking about money here. I'm talking about craft. I guess they're probably one of the best folks to be working with at this time.

Over the course of your career, whether on the other side of a camera, program or ticket booth, what have you noticed about what holds creatives back, whether from a fuller expression or from moving ahead in their career?

I think the first place that my thoughts go to when you ask this question is about softness, and how structures are hard and not malleable enough to accommodate vision, flexibility of vision. We talk about agility—we have to be 'agile', we have to be 'nimble', all these words.

What do they really mean when you apply them to places like, you know, bigger organisations, not just in the arts? These words: agile and nimble and pivot. Are our systems working in a manner that reflects that? That's one thing that can hold artists back.

The other thing might just be a personal capacity. Do you need mentorship? Why don't we have events which are like, 'This is a learning event, we're gonna do a hands-on Adobe Lighthouse thing'. Let's look at which audiences want to learn that, how many audience members we get.

But with the big-C word capitalism, it's 'take take take', we're not looking at 'let's fill'. I think that's one of the lessons I have learned from this particular time that we have experienced as humanity. Why aren't we looking at mentorships, at learning and skill-sharing, peer to peer stuff? Sorry, I am digressing from the question.

You're not, actually. It makes me think about gatekeeping. I think the creative industry in capitalist mode expects you to be fully formed. As you say, there's not a lot of filling or giving. Because when you're in an extractive industry, you either have it or you don't. The industry stops becoming regenerative in that respect.

100 per cent. It is extractive in nature and transactional. Of course, everybody says 'forming community', and 'talking to community'. But there's only so far back that you can roll your eyes. How community is formed is like, knocking on the door of your neighbour and offering them half of the cake that you made. So then when they have extra lemons, they give you that. When they're locked out, you allow them to sit in (your) house and call the locksmith. I think that's how communities work. It's a give and take. You cannot do the things that you say you are doing unless it's a give and take.

Within the arts sector, if you are extracting from community, what are you putting back into community? I don't want to hear people say, 'Oh, the process of performing, they are giving back to the community'. But what are you doing?

You have to really check against this idea of virtue too, because sometimes that becomes cover. 'Well, I'm providing opportunities'. But they're usually one-off opportunities. It's not about sustaining someone's career.

Yeah sure, okay, opportunities, that's great. That's your bit for the community. It's like 'when I reach this level, I have talked to community, I have given to the community or build community'. But it's not a destination. It's an ongoing process. You do it with other folks or you have programs which are mentorship-related, internship-related, skills building. I think that that's one of the things that is really missing in our arts sector, that capacity-building. Nobody is fully formed. So what are we doing about that?

What about you? You're a creative in your own right. How do you make room for your own craft? And what are you working on or would like to work on?

Very good question. Yes, it's a big word, 'creative'. I am trained to be a writer. I cannot make time for it with full time work, and that's a given. For anybody, it's really hard. Also, I'm a very domestically oriented person. I want to have more time to myself and my family, my husband, and my extended family and friends. And so it becomes challenging to make time for that. That's one thing that I want to learn, how to make time to do your own art and have your own creative practice. It's more of a bent right now than a practice. One day, hopefully, it will become that.

What I would like to be doing is to be writing more, but I'm also trying to explore other creative avenues. I'm trying to learn how to use clay. I want to learn how to sing. So not just writing but trying to have a creative life. I guess, so to speak, the most creative I get is with food, the food that I cook.

Food does feature prominently in other conversations we've had, and in some of the writing or connections you've made. Can you talk me through why food is so important to you? How does it sustain life for you? I mean, apart from the literal sense!

I think it's such a primal thing, feeding yourself. It's also a skill. Not everybody can cook. I'm thankful that I enjoy it. It is one of the most endless mediums that exist, that you can do so much with.

If we go deeper, I think it's connection, it's memory. It's a sense of fulfilment. For the longest time I was missing the smell of hot mustard oil. Back home, we would cook with that. And so I just went to the Indian store and bought it and the smell, it's pungent, but it's really good. It reminds me of things. I'm eating foods now which my mother would make when I was a child that I would detest. So that's been a journey. I'm actually making those dishes, making them really well. I have come full circle.

I want to bring up the review that you wrote of Shu-Ling Chua's collection of essays, ECHOES. In her work and in your response to her work, the diasporic sentiment comes through. I was just wondering what you thought about liminality and why it's so generative?

The word ‘liminality’ has a lot to do with threshold. So almost like the threshold of the house or structure. So you're basically standing and looking at two worlds at the same time. That's the richness of it, not one (but) two, for some three or four, depending on the languages and places they have lived and been raised in. So liminality is probably a condition, not in a medicalised way, a time in a person's life, which might extend all through their life. And there will be many people experiencing that.

It gives you insight into different worlds, different languages, different cultures. Perspective, experience, and language itself turns your tongue in different ways when you speak. It's about the potential to see differently and, one hopes, to reflect that in the lives of people.

You used the word constraint earlier, and we talked about constraints in the art sector, and even personally, for creatives. I was just wondering whether that kind of liminality is a constraint in Western capitalist systems that insist on binaries. You're either one or the other according to settler-colonies that construct these categories. How do you think liminality operates in these systems?

Through art, you show that nothing is binary. In fact, it's a continuum. It cannot be a binary because there are more plural experiences to account for and to experience and enrich your life. In so-called Australia, there are so many creatives and collectives who bring to the fore experiences of the diaspora. It is a country partly being built out of diasporas.

There is a responsibility to be played by people who are the system, who are the constraints, to crack things open so that some light can shine through, and more perspectives can come in. How are you undoing systems and unlearning things? Nobody has a single culture but there is a monoculturalism here, I guess.

How do you navigate these things personally and professionally? Because you come from a context that is multicultural by default, really multilayered, multidimensional. Then you land yourself in a context that is a lot more rigid.

First six months here, I was so shocked. I think I was shocked that I was shocked. Like I was totally unmoored. I didn't know where to hook something, to be something. I think what has brought me out of that has been friends, and connections which are, even if negative, there's a constructive aspect to it and broadens my experience. Having social circles that inform and support has been good.

Art has been an important aspect, to educate myself. I have a social activist bent towards looking at art. I would want to see what kinds of art people are making, how does that inform me, and educate me about where I am, my settler status here, those kinds of things. What I'm trying to say is, through good friends, good social circles that can nurture and nourish and educate as well. Plural in nature, always. That's the only way to really understand where you are and have multiple perspectives.

Those things seem to be forms of self-care. What does self-care mean to you? And how else do you practice it apart from what you've just mentioned?

I guess one way has been going back to practices that I was raised with. Like, for example, hair is a huge thing. Growing up as a Sikh woman, we oil our hair, we tie up our hair. So I've tried to blend that in with my own personality.

Going back to food practices, kneading the dough has been so nice. I love making fresh rotis. That's another way of, you know, feeding myself things which connect me, remind me who I was before I came here, and how to keep that continual.

But new aspects have also been added to my life. I got married three years ago. My husband's family are primarily from south India, so there's a lot of different kinds of foods. Learning that has been another kind of self-care and connection.

I have also felt a strong sense of calmness when I walk into parks, reserves or by the ocean and the rivers. I feel grateful that the land has such a hold over my feelings and nurtures me this way.

You mentioned art earlier and taking opportunities to inform yourself. What sort of literature and music are you drawn to? What are you currently reading and listening to?

I love reading South Asian women. I guess it's also an internal thing, where you're like, you know, one day, maybe you'd write that way. But I'm also interspersing that with Black writers and First Nations writers here in Australia. I have been reading Tishani Doshi and Arundhati Roy. I just finished The Cosmopolitans (Anjum Hasan), and The White Girl (Tony Birch), which is an amazing, beautiful story. I love thrillers as well but my taste has become quite literary—literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry. I'm political in my choices, what kind of art I want to consume. I guess everyone is, but not everyone accepts it. Because for me, all choices are political.

I'm also listening to Jorja Smith and Joy Crookes. They are both UK-based artists, young women, beautiful voices, really strong politics. They're 'with the program’. I think that's just my shorthand for saying they know what's what. I’ve also enjoyed watching All My friends are Racist on ABC a lot and looking forward to watching Mystery Road: Origin with Mark Coles Smith.