Turf War, Divya Mehra, Platform, 2010

Alison Gillmor

September 16, 2011

“Turf War”, Divya Mehra’s first solo exhibition, starts with a bang. A full-size luxury car, spray-painted a gorgeously vulgar gold, hangs from the Platform Centre’s wall. Visually, it’s a big-impact piece, cocky and aggressive, but it turns out to hide layers of conceptual subtleties. Tracing the disputed borderlines of 21st century power, Mehra examines the complex cultural markers of status, exclusivity, and wealth.

Mehra, who studied at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art and Columbia University and now divides her time between New York and Winnipeg, is known primarily for her work in video and photography. “Turf War” tracks across some very mixed media—graffiti-style neon signage, a sparkling pile of sand on the gallery floor, a banner-sized text piece, a dramatic little mise-en- scène in a disused stairwell. Offsite pieces include posters on the sides of Winnipeg Transit buses and a paid advertisement in an arts magazine. Each physical object in “Turf War” has a discrete, slightly enigmatic presence, and the accompanying essay by commissioning curator J.J. Kegan McFadden acts as a necessary key to work that requires a lot of historical, political and social unpacking.

The attention-grabbing car is a 1987 Jaguar Vanden Plas, for example, which turns out to be a socio-political landmine. Even the pronunciation of the car’s name—Jag-war or Jag-yoo-are?—is fraught, there being a snipey debate over whether the three-syllable approach is genuinely aristocratic or just fake posh. Jaguar began as a British company in the 1920s, its elegant automobiles associated with the English landed gentry, but is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Motors Ltd., which is headquartered in Mumbai. Once this backstory comes out, Mehra’s piece can be viewed as a concise expression of postcolonial revenge against a declining empire.

But it’s even more nuanced than that. The car is gutted: The engine is gone, the windows are blacked out, and the DIY paint job is cheap and flashy. Blind and useless, the car stands as a blingy kind of trophy, its ambivalent meaning underlined by the confrontational title, I am the American Dream (still just a Paki). Mehra offers a tougher version of the usual rags-to-riches immigrant story, one that factors in the sting of racism and suggests a complicated mix of aspiration and anger, defensiveness and bravado.

GEORGIA SCHERMAN PROJECTS, INC. 133 TECUMSETH STREET TORONTO ONTARIO M6J 2H2 CANADA 416 554 4112

Distrustful of the us-them, either-or dialectics of old-school Marxism, Mehra seems particularly interested in newer and more oblique forms of power, as capitalism’s industrial age gives way to the 21st century’s rapidly shifting knowledge-based economy. As an adjunct to the gallery show, the artist took out a full-page ad in Border Crossings, the Winnipeg-based arts magazine, which read: “DIVYA MEHRA PAID FOR THIS PAGE.” Entitled Real Estate Tycoon, this piece implies a different kind of “property,” information and exposure being the new global currencies.

Several works look at the power of cool, especially in light of new communication technologies, the rise of social media and the quick dissolve between private and public. The 2010 film The Social Network suggests that Mark Zuckerberg’s single-minded obsession with the success of Facebook came from rage at being snubbed by the elite clubs of Harvard’s WASP ascendancy. In The catalyst for change so often in history is War, Mehra references Facebook’s graphic look and terminology. The piece—a large-scale latex-on- vinyl mural that reads, “I don’t want to be friends”—looks straightforward and declarative, but as with so many of Mehra’s works, its final significance is hard to pin down. Does this “de-friending” mean that the speaker is opting out, rejecting the disembodied intimacy of the Internet, or is it just a way to increase desirability by appearing unavailable? While the rhetoric of social networking emphasizes sharing and connecting in an open, transparent way, the endless lists of friends, moods, and favourite bands imply a new power structure, where status is balanced precariously between inclusion and exclusion, between the lure of over-sharing and the danger of overexposure.

The List, an installation in the gallery’s disused spiral staircase, consists of carelessly discarded champagne bottles and a play-list of posturing rap songs. Mehra uses the club as a metaphor for social envy, the crucial question being whether you are on the list or not, whether you are stuck behind the rope or ushered past it. In the queasy symbiosis of fame, Mehra suggests, the VIPs need the ordinary people waiting outside on the street to reinforce their special status, while the rubberneckers need the celebrities to fuel their fantasies. Power turns into a standoff between access and exclusion.

Mehra is clearly drawn to style wars, where street cred can trump old money and outsider subcultures can end up with an inside edge. But “Turf War” also looks at old-fashioned shooting wars. As McFadden points out in his curatorial essay, the piece Tryst with Destiny references the long-running and often violent border disputes between India and Pakistan: The title is taken from Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech on the eve of the Partition that divided the two countries in 1947. But as often happens with Mehra’s work, the high historical seriousness of the title slides into the abrasive, smart-assed attitude of the work itself, which consists of a neon sign that flashes the phrase “real paki” onto the street below. Mehra plays with the hiphop notion of “realness” and the idea that a subculture can reclaim a pejorative term like “paki,” while simultaneously suggesting, with that rigidly fixed bit of faux graffiti, that authenticity is an illusion and a trap.

GEORGIA SCHERMAN PROJECTS, INC. 133 TECUMSETH STREET TORONTO ONTARIO M6J 2H2 CANADA 416 554 4112

Mehra continues her predictably tricky take on identity politics in The Pleasure of Hating, which comically fuses the geopolitical and the personal. As the exhibition’s only photograph, the image demands a certain amount of focus. In a darkly funny version of the family snapshot, Mehra pictures her father, whose home country is Pakistan, squaring off with her mother, who is from India. Each parent wears a sweatshirt declaring his or her national allegiance, the lettering suggesting sports teams, the colour scheme alluding to the Crips and Bloods, whose archetypal blue and red bandanas, McFadden points out, have become the most recognizable signifiers of gang life.

It’s an inspired gambit for Mehra to juxtapose references to urban gangs and international nuclear tensions with her comfortably middle-aged and middle- class parents. But dividing a domestic space into Team India and Team Pakistan also makes serious points about cultural affiliations, which can be as comfortable as old sweatshirts or as potentially dangerous as gang colours. The complicated nature of cultural identity extends into the photograph’s seemingly random, sneakily significant background, which mixes North American suburbia with traditional South Asian art and a Chippendale-style china cabinet (Chippendale furniture brought “orientalised” motifs to Europe during the fever of cultural appropriation in the 18th and 19th centuries, another example of the way symbols aren’t fixed but alter across places and periods).

Silver Bullet (Drawing a Line in the Sand) is a pile of sand sitting on the gallery floor, prone to getting kicked around. That soft line of sand sums up “Turf War’s” constantly contested borderlines. Using sly humour to reframe questions of power and privilege, Mehra turns status symbols into shifty signifiers and cultural identity into disputed territory.

GEORGIA SCHERMAN PROJECTS, INC. 133 TECUMSETH STREET TORONTO ONTARIO M6J 2H2 CANADA 416 554 4112