Zenaéca Singh: home sweet home

Zenaéca Singh: home sweet home

Ng’onga Silupya

The idea of home and belonging is often interpreted differently and is solely dependent on one’s experience and interpretation of a safe space. In this context, many opinions and questions have been raised about what really makes a person belong. Is it when one is born, lives, and creates relationships in a particular context? Or when one is connected through a bloodline to a particular ethnic group that gives them an identity and makes them feel that they belong? 

Home is no longer seen as just a physical space where we go to rest and store our possessions. Home can be felt anywhere. It could be in music, food, language, and many more cultural notions that are familiar and make us feel attached. Sometimes home can be felt in places we have never been before.

Zenaéca Singh is an Indian South African-born multimedia visual artist. She interrogates the politics of her identity and ancestry, and the history of the indentureship of Indians in South Africa through archives that often homogenise the diversity of the South African Indian community. Singh began her career at an early age, in her secondary and tertiary schooling, after which she studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, where she was exposed to postcolonial and decolonial discourses, and where she strengthened her visual language and conception. This enabled her to think critically and question her identity and heritage.

In her practice, Singh critically assesses how the history of the South African Indian ethnic group is written. She responds by representing the idea of home, in this case showcasing the identity she portrays as a home for those who lack it. She foregrounds racial injustice and the discrimination faced by minority groups who are often displaced through colonialism, migration, and other factors. She is interested in aiding a platform for the voiceless to be heard.

'I have always strongly felt an impetus to speak to my history, much of which was not very well known to me in my early youth, and finding how the violence of indentureship was obscured and hidden in the past through various means of state governance and control only gave me more reason to speak to this history,’ says Singh. ‘That is why I chose to work with sugar, the very crop that was cultivated and mass-produced.’ 

The artist goes on to explain that, while sugar is a labour-intensive medium to engage with, reworking the properties of sugar becomes ‘an immersive exercise for me and a way of thinking through and honouring the labour of my elders and ancestors whose hard labour and resilience allowed for me to exist today'.

Singh’s approach to painting evokes feelings of both nostalgia and melancholia. She uses postcolonial writings on memory, trauma, the diaspora, landscape, and cultural history together with artistic influences. She has been working with sugar as an ongoing medium to explore her research on history and identity, and her engagement with the material has evolved over the years. 

Sugar is integral to my work. I use sugar in its varying properties of transparency and opacity to reflect the nature of the archive and its residual implications today. The different methodologies of sugar application in my practice allow for interesting analogies to be made regarding the ways in which discourses on indenture, South African Indianness, and womanhood have been constructed. Working with the hardness of crystalised sugar, the fragility of sugar-glass, the fluidity of the submergence in a dense sugar-water solution, and sticky residues and stains of molasses, I extend the medium of sugar to render shift from violence to honour moments of leisure and self-making. [1]

Singh’s recent molasses paintings in the ARAK Collection are drawn from a series featuring work from A Sweet Assembly (2022), Home (2022), Sweet Sisters (2022), and Granny and Ma (2022). They are all drawn from different family archives and carry Singh’s signature ethereal visual language. 

These bodies of work were part of a larger 2022 installation called Bittersweet Impressions, consisting of family photos that she recreated on sugar paste and painted with molasses. It is fascinating to learn that Singh creates her own sugar paper for the molasses photographs and additional display pieces. These artworks are profoundly inspired by the Medieval Banquets of the sixteenth century, during which the noble class made use of sugar for creating relief sculptures that would depict scenes of political and religious importance. 

'I paint with molasses to create the family photos, with the bitter-sweetness and sticky residue of the molasses serving as a metaphor for the remains of colonialism and its implications,' she further explains.

Singh is heavily drawn to the narratives of choice in the discourses of migration and belonging and the broader and relational aspects of labour politics. The site of the ‘home’ holds great value to her practice and interrogation as it is a deeply contested site in South Africa’s history of land dispossession and its subsequent issues of access that have left many physically and economically displaced. Coming from a minority race and ethnic background in a foreign context, there is often a struggle with identity and the continuous search for a sense of belonging. Misrepresentation of history and stereotypes emerge from these ideologies.

Despite her work seeming so effortlessly made, Singh shares some of her encounters during her creative process as being difficult. 

Ideating the work and making the work is always a love-hate relationship for me as I gave myself an interesting problem of working with sugar. When the idea finally hits it’s a matter of problem-solving how I am going to execute the idea. For example, making sugar paintings meant a lot of trial and error but I eventually got there and figured out an adaptable recipe for sugar paste, which I then use as a surface to paint on with molasses. I tend to be quite structural in my making and always need a step-by-step process of making my work by constantly doing small-scale experiments. [2]

Singh’s work, through both the archival scenes it references, and the unique material it makes use of, becomes a way of working through generational and historical trauma and allowing for the potential of healing too. She also hopes her work can be relational and open conversations around history and identity. 

As my practice develops, I want to make it more communally involved and workshop-based to share and grow alternate ways of understanding history and expressing oneself. I believe that art making is such a powerful tool and there are no rules, everyone can create art in their own meaningful ways when given the space to. Making and creating can be a very meditative process that helps relink one with self and community.

[1] Interview with the author, 2024.

[2] Interview with the author, 2024. 

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Cover artwork: Zenaéca Singh, Granny and Ma, 2022. Molasses on sugar paste, 12 x 9 cm. 

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