Sehej Kaur
ssehej@proton.me
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Sehej Kaur is an emerging artist working on Darug Country. Travelling between sterile, domestic and interwebbed worlds, Sehej seeks out points of tension and overlap, interested in embracing the forever flux of her body amongst extractive structures in the so-called West. Sehej utilises the digital landscape and its natural multiplicity as non-linear methods of re-archival and reclaim.

Beyond material practice, Sehej is radio maker for show Race Matters at FBI Radio and Co-director for Western Sydney ARI ‘Pari Gallery’ and the hybrid art/health space The Waiting Room Project.

CV
How to Peel a Pomegranate

How to Peel a Pomegranate, 2023-2025, video, prayer mats, mala (flower garland)

Shown at Sydenham International, for ‘history doesn’t repeat it rhymes’


click here to watch video DESCRIPTION

The hands of the artists mother fill the frame of How to Peel a Pomegranate, working to extract pomegranate seeds. An accompanying voice over tells the viewer the best technique for extracting the seeds and that one pomegranate seed can cure one thousand illnesses.

This familial scene of knowledge being passed from one generation to the next highlights the artists interest in inherited knowledge surrounding health and medicine. The artist's practice speaks to the tensions between cultural traditions of care and western medical practices. Her work is particularly focused on how this plays out when living within a diasporic community.

Emulating a shrine, the work How to Peel a Pomegranate sits close to the floor, surrounded by garlands. As the viewer you must lower yourself to the delineated space in order to view it. This act from the viewer further enhances the questioning of western expectations. That there are many ways to view and to approach the gaining of wisdom.

Using media as a form of archival exploration the artist presents the viewer with a work that not only speaks of the way care and knowledge is passed on but actively gives that care and knowledge to the audience as they view it.

Words by Curator Tamara Elkins