VITHYA SUBRAMANIAM

Creator of Thamizhachi: A Digital Museum of Tamil Women Under Construction and Rasanai: An Invitation to Appreciate

“I think of my art as more concerned with the non-human objects in human lives. In this current project, it is objects of Tamil woman-ness; in a previous project, it was objects of migrant worker communities. My current Dphil study of the materialities of ‘Indian-ness’ in Singapore is actually a pragmatic modification in order to continue the degree in Covid times. Initially I was to study the materialities of territorial imagination across Pakistani and Indian Punjab. You can imagine why that’d be impossible now. But having turned these lenses onto my own country and community, and essentially myself, I realise I might have been intentionally avoiding it all these years for fear that I wouldn’t be taken as seriously for studying ‘myself’, for being ‘just’ the native ethnographer. Now that I’ve started on it, I realise it is necessary and fecund work.

The focus of the museum is specifically the Singaporean Tamil woman, everything that I am too. In leveraging the ‘authority’ of the museum form to give this project ‘legitimacy’, I also wanted to question the institution and the public discourse it represents. I wanted to point out that Tamil women were largely absent from Singapore’s museums. At the same time, I wanted to show Tamil women that they can transgress the ‘official narrative’ or the reductive assumptions of others, that they don’t only need to be in official museums to have presence, to have artefacts, to have history, to be Singaporean.”