Suitcase Aesthetics: The Making of Memory in Diaspora Art in Britain in the Later 1980s

This essay explores the making of memory in two artworks dating from the later 1980s. Chila Kumari Burman's "Convenience Not Love" (1986-87) and Zarina Bhimji's "She Loved to Breathe-Pure Silence" (1987) are among many artworks by diaspora artists that imagine and reinvent individual, familial and collective memory, and in which autobiography connects to wider histories of voluntary and forced migration through which diverse South Asian communities arrived in post-war Britain. The essay draws on Sarat Maharaj's elaboration of a 'suitcase language or system of representation'. The term 'suitcase aesthetics' is elaborated to consider artistic investigations of dislocation and relocation, transit and settlement, crossing borders and questions of belonging. The closing section reflects on the role of living memory in writing about art produced and first exhibited some thirty years ago.