Seeing through the lens of multiple heritages
Nina Mangalanayagam, a visual artist and photographer with Sri Lankan ties, talks of her work at the MMCA exhibition, The Foreigners
Nina Mangalanayagam, does not complain about not belonging- even though with a Sri Lankan Tamil father and a Swedish mother in London (where she went to university), she would not have exactly blended in.
When she grew up in Sweden, this visual artist and photographer, whose work now interrogates and disturbs us as part of the current exhibition titled, The Foreigners, at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) at Crescat, felt more at home in Sweden (and later London) than in searing Jaffna where everything was ‘foreign’ down to the fiery chili sambols when they first came over for a spell, when she was 16.
Even more mystifying was it for the teenager to see her father “slipping into (all of it) quite naturally again after over 30 years”.
“That was strange in itself – to see someone you know very well become someone different in another context,” muses Nina.
So the moniker ‘foreigner’ for Nina has layers and layers:
“It can be (as quoted from the MMCA website) someone who straddles multiple identities, languages, and communities without neatly belonging to one. This position becomes about the self-identification of someone who cannot fit neatly into categories or nationality.
“This position is interesting since it gives perspectives on, and questions structures of nationalities and categories since they become so apparent from this position. With a Swedish background, but with a Tamil father and a Swedish mother I identify with this position, which I have learnt to value.
“But the foreigner is also the perception of others, and as such the role of the foreigner, or the Other, is always shifting. Depending on politics or current groupings of people, who and what is a foreigner is not-fixed...”
Nina’s photos have people (family mostly) posed uncomfortably standing by Christmas trees in living rooms or mushroom-gathering in the woods, having their Easter breakfasts, celebrating traditional Swedish festivals - all as stilted as ill mannequins- which is the effect desired.
The second generation has more confidence on their faces while the emigre parents look gauche trying to be ‘more Swedish than the Swedish’, says Nina.
This is not to say Nina’s generation blends into the grey streets of London and the Swedish like woodwork.
“As someone with multiple heritages I shift positions regularly,” she says. “For example in Europe I am seen as non-white, whereas in Sri Lanka I am often called white and as a child I was treated differently depending on which parent I was with making me aware of how people are treated differently in the everyday in places where the majority of people do now consider themselves racist.”
A little anecdote is telling: “When I graduated from upper secondary school I wanted to wear a light green dress. According to tradition in Sweden all girls wear white dresses. It is an old tradition and not that many people are strict about it anymore. Pappa told me I had to wear white. So to not stick out. I wore a white dress. My friends all wore light pink, light yellow, light blue or light green.”
So many little incongruities glisten in her photos -- glittering saris against drab western bungalows; Tamil tourists in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles; Pongal with coconuts and betel leaves against wintry Stockholm...
Today, Nina is back in Sweden where she grew up after two decades in London’s melting pot- after Brexit she decided firmly to leave.
She teaches photography at the Akademin Valand in Gothenburg and thinks “it is important to (teach while having a practice) since it puts you in the student’s position and it also means that you keep up with techniques and new technologies.”
Nina now lives with her partner from New Zealand and two small children, and has “a fond interest of growing my own tomatoes” she says.