Alex & I

 
Alex & I: Moving Pictures (2016) is an accidental video essay that emerged as I archived a performative “visual lecture” that I had developed and delivered in international art and academic settings between 2013 and 2015. It is part of a broader artistic research project Alex & I, which I undertook between 2013 and 2018 and made in collaboration with the then refugee and media figure Sanjeev “Alex” Kuhendrarajah.

Alex first appeared to me in the media as a self-appointed spokesperson for 254 Tamils attempting to reach Australia by boat in October 2009. The small wooden cargo ship, KM Jeya Lestari 5, appeared on Australian horizons in the immediate aftermath of the thirty-year civil war in Sri Lanka, which had concluded in May that year and in which tens of thousands of Tamils were killed. After the boat was towed back to the Indonesian port of Merak, the migrants refused to disembark, initiating a stand-off with authorities and a media spectacle that lasted for six months. Alex jumped ship before the stand-off resolved and lived as a fugitive in South East Asia before resurfacing in 2012 in a Bangkok immigration detention centre. Using images of Alex that had circulated in the news and on social media to elaborate on his story of migration, I extended knowledge about his circumstances well beyond the attention span of the news cycle. Alex & I was undoubtably an uneven collaboration in which I attempted to offset his incarceration and incapacitation with my relative privilege and mobility. Over time I became a kind of strange interlocutor with whom Alex could discuss his situation and those of other refugees in Thailand and access a wider and often specialised audience with whom he would otherwise have no contact.

Connecting with Alex and intervening in his narrative also became a way for me to negotiate my Tamil heritage and engage with Tamil diasporas around the world. Via texts, performances and artworks I was able to connect with communities in Australia, Canada, Singapore and Germany and deconstruct and develop my own modes of (post-war Tamil) identity-making. Thus, according to cultural theorist Suvendrini Perera, Alex & I can be considered as a mode of “survival media”, an example of “the expressive forms through which Tamil migrant, refugee and diasporic subjects engage with the war in Lanka from the location of the aftermath” with a particular emphasis on “the social ecologies and transnational politics and poetics they bring into play.”¹

By circulating and narrating images of Alex and the events they represent, Alex & I sought to develop post-war political subjectivities that were neither aligned to the rhetoric of Tamil nationalism and the separatist “dream of Eelam” or other nationalist agendas, which galvanised around his passage of migration, including Australian, Javanese-Indonesian, Sri Lankan Sinhalese and Thai. Rather Alex & I spoke to those aligned with migrants, such as the journalists, migrant and Indigenous activists, alongside members of Sri Lankan Tamil diasporas who sought to listen to the voices and demands of refugees and remain sensitive to their acts of resistance and assertions of agency.

Significantly, Alex & I employed a mode of “friendship” after Facebook, the social media platform which developed “friending” into a gesture of hyper-gregarious networked communication.² On Facebook, “friend” no longer signifies an altruistic relationship, but rather encompasses a concept and action by which one expands one’s social media network, triggering a range of computational network-based operations that extract value. Alex & I is an attempt to politicise this now ubiquitous method of performing oneself, and notably one’s trauma, as a form of “free labour” for information, communications and data-analysis corporations.³

In 2017, Alex received a passport and decided to return to Sri Lanka, effectively bringing Alex & I to its conclusion. What does it mean, then, to continue to circulate these images from Merak and Bangkok? While the tensions of the “geo-politico-cultural space” that Perera names the “borderscape” have changed,⁴ and indeed Australia’s regime of offshore detention and “border protection” intensified in the following years, these images of Alex still speak to the ongoing violence of the refugee experience. They are also a part of the material history of post-war Tamil diasporas. It is worth noting that as the media were prevented from entering the no-fire zones declared in the final stages of the war in Sri Lanka, images taken on cell phones and circulated online have a certain poignancy. My circulation and re-narration of this history also aims to encourage new understandings of the long aftermath of the war in Sri Lanka and its mediatised and transnational character.

Formally, I am interested in images that Hito Steyerl describes as “poor images”, the “Wretched of the Screen”, which “testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images.”⁵ The media images of Alex were propagated, distributed and discarded as part of the news cycle. To recoup these images, put them back into circulation, recall the events they represent and to rethink them in the present is an act of resistance—an act of “memory against forgetting”.⁶

Aside from images gleaned from news and social media, the broader project of Alex & I also collected images smuggled out of detention centres and photo portraits made with marginalised refugee communities on the outskirts of Bangkok.⁷ These images were shared in community, art, activist, and academic contexts and accompanied by discussions that considered their modes of representation and production. These means of circulation, self-reflection and discussion aligns Alex & I with the methods of anticolonial cinema in which the film experience stimulates the development of politicised subjectivities and counter-hegemonic movements.⁸

As a video essay, Alex & I: Moving Pictures does not compete in the same circuits of distribution as the products of the film or television industries, the commercial art world or the news media from which many of its images were sourced, and rather appeals to “nonconformist information circuits”.⁹ Although it has appeared in curated exhibitions and screening programmes, I would argue that Alex & I: Moving Pictures is an “imperfect cinema” in its attempts to side-step the expectations of audiences conditioned to high-resolution and professionally designed images. Rather, propelled by an enthusiasm for ephemera and a commitment to these images and the (minor) histories and friendships that they represent, Alex & I: Moving Picture attempts to make yesterday’s news mean something today.