Wimbledon College of Arts connects with Southall and Hyderabad

Last year, a series of arts-based community events in Southall and an international workshop conducted online between Wimbledon College of Arts BA Acting and Performance students and students from the University of Hyderabad in India explored themes of personal journeys, notions of home, displacement and assimilation through creative activities and performances.

Taking place between July and December 2021, activities included a community arts festival, photography workshops, exhibitions and performances as well as a seminar involving local artists and community activists.

These were just some of the outcomes of the research network, ‘Cultural Heritage and Representation: (Mis) readings between India and the Indian Diaspora’, set up in January 2020 and led by Professor Jane Collins of Wimbledon College of Arts and Professor B. Anandakrishnan, Head of the Department of Theatre Arts in Hyderabad.

The network, established pre-COVID, was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), exploring cultural heritage and representation in India and the Indian Diaspora.

The project initially involved a series of arts-based workshops, co-ordinated by Mahenderpal Sorya, researcher and lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins (CSM) with first generation Indian immigrants based in Southall, sharing their histories and experiences of arrival in the UK and their current perceptions of their Indian cultural heritage.

Every Wednesday from late January to early March 2020, in conjunction with our partners, the Southall Community Alliance, based in Southall Town Hall, a group of elderly residents, shared their memories of India and stories of arrival in the UK in the 1960’s and 70’s. This diasporic group were pioneers in the way they negotiated their dual identities as British Indians in an often hostile environment.

We were interested in how they viewed their Indian cultural heritage now. What is lost and what is gained through the process of integration into the host culture? What new subjectivities are created, and identities performed?  Sadly, these activities had to be suspended in mid-March 2020 because of Covid-19.

When lockdown restrictions were lifted, we finally got permission from the funding body to restart the project in May 2021. By this time, we had already established a network of community activists, arts practitioners, academics and volunteers who were keen to continue their engagement with us. In discussions with our partners, we agreed that working indoors was still not a safe option for these vulnerable elderly residents even with restricted numbers and social distancing, it was potentially too high risk. We decided to move our activities outside.

Southall Ever After Festival

In its mission statement the Southall Community Alliance seeks ‘to address the social, cultural, environmental, religious and local needs of the area’. Southall is a vibrant and diverse community and so the research team started to think about ways of expanding the project to include wider representation of the community in Southall, to align with the mission statement of the Alliance, whilst still fulfilling our research aims in relation to Indian cultural heritage.

The idea of a festival, to support and celebrate the diverse communities of Southall coming out of lockdown emerged gradually.  As our ambitions expanded, Southall Ever After became an opportunity to engage local people in arts-based activities that encouraged them to reflect on their relationship to Southall, and their personal and collective past, present and future.  The South Ever After festival included live theatre performances, a steel band which played outside the town hall, mural painting, a pop-up museum, street photography, craft workshops and an interactive exhibition.

Over 4 Saturdays between August and September, the public were invited to participate in these activities in outdoor settings in Wolf Fields, an urban nature reserve on the edge of Southall with a focus on education and sustainability; and in Southall Park, an extensive green space in the centre of the town. With four marquees signalling our presence, we were lucky with the weather on most of the weekends.

During lockdown, project researcher Mahenderpal Sorya had independently forged a relationship with a number of other local organisations including Gunnersbury Park Museum, running a photography workshop online entitled, Being South Asian.  This project, supported by Research at Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon, resulted in an immensely successful exhibition in July in the galleries of the Gunnersbury Park Museum, with photographic works of the South Asian community dispersed amongst the museum’s permanent collection.

A number of the Being South Asian photographic works now form part of the permanent collection in Gunnersbury Park Museum and Jennal Amin, joined the research network team, curating a pop museum as part of the Southall Ever After festival, including a display of photographs by Dennis Morris, part of the Gunnersbury Park collection.

Morris’s iconic images of Southall in the 1970s were exhibited alongside selected examples from the recent Being South Asian works. This not only raised awareness of the work of people like Dennis Morris and his photographs of ordinary local people in the 1970s, but they also brought back memories for many elderly residents.

All the festival activities were immensely popular with the local community. The local Punjabi Theatre Academy staged 2 outdoor performances which attracted a large audience. This was a new concept for the company and potentially expanded their outreach work.

International artist Sheila Ghelani ran a series of craft workshops which were popular with parents and children. Over 2 of the Saturdays, Routes to Roots, an interactive drawing project which the  team co-devised with the ‘Lost Stories Collective’ engaged local residents in tracing their journeys, or their parents’ and grandparents’ journeys to Southall, to form the diverse community that exists today.

The London Transport Museum based in Acton, also mounted a pop-up exhibition, they were keen to collect stories of the early Asian pioneers on London buses. This attracted much attention and stories started to unfold, even amongst festival organisers of their early links with London transport.

The festival also included a street photography workshop run by Sat Sehmbey (CSM) with Mahenderpal Sorya, using photography to reflect on the ways in which Southall’s high street has been shaped, over many years, by migration. This activity had an impact beyond the festival as 1 of the participants, Janet Batchelor entered a photograph she had taken in Southall Park into a competition for members of the Martin Parr Foundation and won the 1^st prize.

The success of the festival is summed up by Janpal Singh Basran, Southall Community Alliance, Network and Community Development Manager in his newsletter:

The Seminar and Practice Exchange

The value of these kind of projects and ways of future-proofing them formed part of the seminar that followed in November where local activists, artists and residents discussed ways of embedding arts-based activities more firmly in the community.

The seminar also returned to the original research questions of the network grant: What do we mean by cultural heritage? Is it important? If so, why? The seminar included a screening of a film of the festival made by David Fenton, and the group discussed the extent to which the festival had engaged with Indian cultural heritage specifically, and more broadly how it had challenged perceptions of what that term might mean in relation to Southall.

The final element of the project was an international practice exchange between students at Wimbledon and students from the Department of Theatre Arts, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication at the University of Hyderabad, a 2-day online movement workshop sharing training methods and making work together. The international makeup of the student cohort, with many students far from their homes, results in small diasporic communities in both institutions.

Facilitated by Catherine Busk in Wimbledon and Noushad Mohamed Kunju in Hyderabad, students explored their personal journeys through movement, reflecting on notions of home, displacement and assimilation. What are the commonalities of experience? What are the potential problems inherent in the process of assimilation? What are its benefits?

Next steps

The next stage of the project will be to write up our research findings in collaboration with colleagues in India who have been conducting their own research. Although the pandemic severely restricted our joint research activities, including international travel, we have achieved a remarkable amount under very difficult circumstances.

The value of the network is evidenced in the ongoing dialogue with Southall Community Alliance and Gunnersbury Park Museum and the opportunities this offers for further links between these organisations and courses at Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon, more widely across UAL and with Hyderabad, India. So, looking to the future, as well as writing up, we will also be looking for further funding.

Project credits

In the UK:
Jane Collins, Principal Investigator and Project Co-ordinator, Wimbledon College of Arts, UAL
Mahenderpal Sorya, Researcher and workshop coordinator, Central Saint Martins, UAL
Project partner: Janpal Basran Singh, Southall Community Alliance
Project partner: Jennal Amin Gunnersbury Park Museum
Gabriele Grigorjeva, administrator

In India:
Professor B. Anandakrishnan, Head of the Department of Theatre Arts, University of Hyderabad

• Find out more about Research at Wimbledon College of Arts
• Find out more about BA Acting and Performance at Wimbledon