My Goddess Gave Birth to A Goddess

I am fighting two wars.

Women of color are fighting a war of representation that reaches into the past and projects itself into the future. A war over who is visible and who authors what is seen. Women like Matahari took our clothing, our jewelry, and our cultural products, selling them as their own until we became alienated by our own image. Now the world is populated by our absence, and the twisted versions created by these wannabes. Our bodies are being bought and sold all the time, but we still don’t make any money. Like vampires we suffer from being unable to see ourselves in the mirror.

I created Sadette Delacroix to fight the war for me. My inner goddess gave birth to a psychedelic time traveling goddess who seeks to infiltrate the system; to create, distribute, and profit. A brown girl imitating a white girl, imitating a brown girl. I can’t culturally appropriate myself, I’m TAKING IT BACK. Because I listened to my auntie when she told me we didn’t wear blouses under our saris before the British infected us with repression and made the temple dancers into prostitutes. That body is mine, to make, recreate, and multiply.

Artists are fighting a war, with people who want art to exist purely as an elite commodity, alienated both from meaning and a public. They want it to be a dead object, a token of speculation. People need beauty for meaning making, not just industrial consumption. And when we have unearthed all the sexism and bigotry from the world’s religions, will we have anything left…Will we still have space to be spiritual, worship beauty, and connect to each other? Could art be that space?

So come to the goddess, buy her icons, perform her rituals.

Live in beauty; be connected, blessed

Indrani Ashe is an American visual artist working with performance and installation whose practice has spanned 10 years and 3 continents. A graduate of the prestigious Goldsmiths, University of London MFA program , She also spent years in self-directed study ‘decolonizing’ her aesthetic in Indonesia, presenting several solo exhibitions and collaborative works there. Her practice examines intimacy, identity, and community; often fingering the interstices between digital and physical realms of existence. Having been based in Berlin since 2015, she exhibited 3 new bodies of work in the German capital last year. This is her first solo exhibition in Europe.

Artist:

Indrani Ashe (US)

2018/03