Interview #182 — TextaQueen

by Haneen Mahmood Martin


TextaQueen is known for using the humble fibre-tip marker to draw out complex politics of gender, race, sexuality and identity. Their portraiture unweaves the impact of cultural and colonial legacies, and the influence of visual and popular culture on personal identity.

TextaQueen spoke to Haneen Mahmood Martin about about the strictures of the institution, proximity to whiteness, and the apocalypses of colonialism.


This interview was first published as part of Liminal’s first print edition, in 2019.


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In your time as an artist, how have you seen the art scene evolve, in Australia and elsewhere, for artists who are ‘other/ed’?

When I was younger it was a rare occasion that I would see work on white walls that represented some tangent to my own experience. Now there is a greater representation of ‘diverse’ experiences even in so-called Australia, yet I feel conflicted about calling it an evolution. Institutions that were built by dusty white men on stolen land, filled with their dusty ideas and stolen things, want to appear relevant by temporarily featuring ‘othered’ artists for a dash of spice whilst still centering the salt and pepper blandness they have always preferred.

Institutions creak open to include artists who tick the boxes of diversity yet generally are in some way palatable to privileged audiences, whose work can be framed as centring their titillation, entertainment or mild educational growth. interpersonally, we are expected, as much as ever, to smile and be polite, to perform gratitude without attitude for being one of the few chosen for inclusion.

I was recently a creative fellow at State Library Victoria creating a series called “The Circus of the Oppressed” about marginalised artists experiences of tokenism within institutional complexes. I had access to great resources and support, yet there was a toll to being one of two people of colour out of 24 fellows. Every week, my belonging was verbally or less overtly questioned by different white staff members (not security) as I moved in the staff corridors with my staff card hanging around my neck. They weren’t used to seeing a brown person in restricted areas who wasn’t someone in uniform guarding or cleaning the place. There is relative privilege to being a token artist alongside the burden, with our own Internal forces as well as these kinds of external reminders saying, ‘Are you lost?’ And ‘you’re not supposed to be in here’.

In their desire for relevance, progressive arts institutions will seek ’diverse’ work they might label as ‘political’ and ‘confronting’’ yet that usually means work which will titillate white liberal guilt or validate their consciousness, work that may reference but not really challenge the power structures that keep the dusty white men up in their ill-gotten places. For example There is more space made for work that spectacularly processes colonial trauma with disempowered subjects than work centring the empowerment of their subjects. even work that has a ‘made for us by us’ attitude suffers a reframing in the institutional context.

I find it very difficult now to have those transformational experiences I did when I was younger when witnessing work affirming my lived experiences. This is because I’m now experienced in what it means to be on and between those white walls as an artist. It is exhausting when dynamics relating to the complex politics of race gender sexuality and more that your work embodies, are re-enacted on your own body when sharing the work publicly. I wish white women would stop literally petting and stroking me and calling me a clever girl at my art openings.

Whenever I see other ‘othered’ artists who seem to conceptually flavour their work for the progressive institution palette and who personally are better able to codeswitch and play the game, when I see them gain more inclusion and career validation, I have mixed feelings. I want ‘marginalised people’ to thrive in multiple ways and I wouldn’t want to tear down an individual for playing the game, for trying to survive within an art / world designed to underpay and exploit, especially black, brown, femme, queer labour. But I wish there was space for a greater range of intersectional expressions that were more liberating to people living in those intersections. As liberating as they can be between colonial walls.

I think especially in so-called Australia there needs to be more honest discussion and support, solidarity, and also constructive critique amongst tokenised artists. Talks are happening; Tania Cañas’ article, ‘Diversity is a White Word’ I’m sure illustrated many people’s thoughts. But how do usually tokenised artists practically support each other beyond liking each other’s social media posts? How can people across different lived experiences critically engage and exist within the art world? Whilst prioritising the real lives and bodies of those most disempowered by the oppressive structures its built on? It’s easy enough to hashtag #decolonizenow and #fuckthepatriarchy but how often is it followed through by real life support of black and brown femmes especially if it risks the good graces of more privileged folk.

I don’t have answers to those questions. I don’t believe you can ever create a ‘safe space’, can’t promise the space you create is going to be safe even if everyone entering it shares your identities and intentions. Motivated from experiences in institutions and residencies of being the only one across my four tick boxes of diversity, I aim to create intimate and collaborative artist residencies for marginalised people usually alienated by the environment of residences.

You host a lot of workshops independently and part of various residencies. As an established and visible artist, do you see this as your responsibility to guide younger artists to find their voice?

My favourite workshop is based on my poster style series, ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’. This is where I drew First Nations and people colour in fictional movie posters battling the apocalypses of colonialism. Because I’m not usually working with only people of colour, the participants draw themselves battling oppression. So really, I’m hosting a workshop deconstructing oppression alongside the drawing workshop, prompting people to represent their marginalised identity in an empowered way.

Many students, especially teens, have a pretty good grasp on this already. But yeah, I think my workshops show some of my own methods of turning ideas, experiences and ambitions into a visual product to share. There are really special moments at the end of workshops where students share their work and both their work and the experiences that prompted the work are validated. That’s a really beautiful thing to witness. What’s less beautiful is when participants who may be more privileged try be saviours of other people in their work and I have to sway them into less problematic designs.

 
 
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Your work is fearlessly political and highly self-representational. What are the largest distinctions between the personality behind your work and yourself in day-to-day setting? Are you afraid of any backlash?

I don’t know if I’m fearless, because I feel like that implies I don’t experience the emotional impacts of making the work that I do and being the person that I am in the world. My work and I are vulnerable. There’s also been unquantifiable career impacts to being the ‘loudmouth’ I am in real life and in my work. By 'loudmouth’, I mostly mean asking myself and others to be treated with humanity and respect, attempting some kind of empowerment. 

I don’t make my work to be confrontational—if someone finds it challenging, it wasn’t made for them. I make the work for the people it resonates with, who don’t need to be challenged by it. For these folks it’s a validation of their own experience. Similarly, I’m not a confrontational person in real life, just always getting better at asserting my boundaries and at resisting my internalised racism and patriarchy to value myself over the comfort of cishet white men.

I’m very aware how the mystique of the artist, or these days, the splayed-out cyber vulnerability of the artist affects the consumption of their work. Often people whom I’ve never met before act very familiar with me, which probably happens to anyone with a social media presence, but especially when your work uses your own body and experience. My work to me, emanates both empowerment and vulnerability and so it often surprises me when people in real life are surprised that I am a complex and emotional being. Or that they can witness the politics within my work they label feminist and anti-racist yet can’t acknowledge how real life racist misogynistic dynamics might affect me.

I had a mid-career survey show Tour in 2017 and 2018 via the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, a few dozen works made over the last fifteen in the enormous gallery space. I had several experiences of racism fuelled misogyny elsewhere in the weeks before the opening and then during the actual opening itself. To say it was extremely emotionally exhausting is an understatement. Having my work celebrated on the walls yet feeling my person be treated with such little care, to feel the dynamics I’m trying to deconstruct in my work acted out on to me was like a hall of mirrors.

It left me with these questions, how can you witness my emotionally and intellectually complex work and not think that I too have that complexity? Can’t you see that this work is vulnerable through the empowerment and that I too am a vulnerable being? I’ve often mistaken people who celebrate or support my work as people I can ask for support in my daily experiences. However, I think that both the powers in the art world and other tokenised artists trying to survive in it prefer to have their shining examples of resilience. Who doesn’t want to believe that an individual can fearlessly triumph over oppression? It’s easier to turn away from any flaws in that projection rather than reflect on your own position.

In an increasingly hostile climate, what advice would you give artist who wants to be as honest and raw in their work as you? 

Get a white straight man as a beard on your arm. I am kind of serious. You might be surprised (or not) what being in proximity to whiteness, whether an artist’s own body or who they partner or hang with, can do to ease your experience in the art world, no matter how raw honest your work is. If you’re talking openly about wanting to burn white supremacy to the ground having a good white person close by is evidence to other white people that you’re talking about the structures and not the individual. While showing that you believe in allies and that of course they can be one too. Obviously not just whiteness eases access, I know my education and class privilege, being a model minority in a certain kind of body, all these things make it somewhat easier to slide into those environments. I speak in certain ways and can write about my work intellectually. I have less to risk, in honesty.

Practically I would say that have a really good support network of other artists or people who aren’t artists but understand your experience to validate you and your work and critique it honestly. You don’t want to tie your worth up in validation from the art world. The white feminist friendly work I did in my early career was bolstered more in the art world than the more intersectional and complex work I do now. Yet which do I value, and feel is more important to people like those closest to me in my life? And in seeking validation I don’t mean via social media; I mean real people in real life 

What are the main ways you have learned about your culture given you were raised in Australia?

This is what I have been processing in many ways in a solitary way, personally and creatively. - what is ‘my culture’? I had a few decades of white people asking me about ‘my culture’ while being raised expected to assimilate towards white Australianness. Others seeking some insight into culturally authentic Indianness while I felt so distant from their projections, made me feel like ‘’my culture’ was something distant to me. My parents are catholic and speak English as a first language before the Indian languages they know, we have a coloniser’s surname. It’s not only their migration that distances me from ‘my culture’ in that colonisation has messed with all ideas of authenticity.

My art illustrates my process of navigating connection and disconnection from my culture. My Unknown artist coconut legacy series and my most recent works on paper series gods save the Queen answer this ongoing question. 

Has social media changed the way you create art?

I’m so grateful that social media didn’t exist when I was starting to make art that I showed other people. I was extremely prolific as a young artist, filling a sketchbook a week with small portraits of people and later putting on shows of two dozen life-size portraits that I completed in a few months with hundreds of people turning up to an opening, many of whom didn’t usually go to a gallery. I don’t know the exact recipe by which I became known in ‘the underground’, before ‘blowing up’, but it was very different than in the social media age.

Even though I made a lot of work in short amounts of time and there was a public element to some of that work there was also this space to create in collaboration privately. With less expected or internalised pressure to create something for daily consumption by others. I think there’s too much put into value of an artist as necessarily needing to be prolific and I think it relates to ableism and capitalism. Social media amplifies these dynamics and leaves little space for slow burn made researched contemplative work to get the space and time it deserves. I’m really grateful that I got to evolve slowly and for the large part privately.

I don’t know if social media has changed the way I myself work as much as it has increased my awareness of how I make my work in relation to how others make their work. I don’t have the desire to be prolific and physically labouring as I used to as I’d rather give space for intellectual and emotional reflection, that I feel makes my work more complex.

Do you have any advice for emerging artists?

Beyond what I’ve said already, I’d say ask yourself, why and who do you want to make your art for? Who do you want to make it accessible for? How are you going to financially and emotionally survive in that world?

Find a sugar parent if you’re not lucky enough to have family who can help you. Don’t underestimate a good support network, and collaborating with people that don’t demand compromise from you. Ensure you get paid what you deserve, always try to calculate what the emotional and physical toll will be on you versus career gains.

What are you currently listening to?

The sound of renovation as the gentrification of Footscray continues. 

How do you practise self-care?

I often overwork myself (doing even more in the past), but having disabilities means if I’m not prioritising my health, it has big consequences. I have a regular morning routine that includes exercise and anyone who knows me knows how I adjust how I eat in response to how my body feels. I try to be in nature and by the water as often as possible. I’m trying harder to not waste my time shifting down gears to accommodate other peoples’ views and opinions and understanding more and more that if my work and my words don’t resonate with folks then it’s simply not for them.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

I know I don’t identify as any kind of Australian, in that ‘Australia’ is a colonial concept that makes false claim to unceded First Nations lands. I’m thinking every day about what it means to be someone of the South Asian diaspora in so-called Australia, yet I don’t really have an easy answer to this question.

It feels like science fiction to exist here and now and as who I am, and not only because of impending climate and world politics doom. Knowing my ancestors are from a place far from here, Goa, India, yet I’m living on Wurundjeri land, is a surreality brought about by colonial apocalypse. I’m seeking home as someone whose belonging is questioned by others who less want to question their own belonging, when most don’t belong to the land on which they live.

I’m trying not to romanticise the idea of always being an outsider. I’m still figuring out how to connect with ‘culture’ in ways that leave space for the other intersections of my identities.

 
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Find out more

textaqueen.com

Interview by Haneen Martin
Photographs by Leah Jing McIntosh