Exiles Photos Selected for Earth Photo 2023 Exhibition

Two of Billy’s pictures, The Bridge and Seamstress, have been selected for Earth Photo 2023, the international competition and exhibition that celebrates the power of visual storytelling about our planet.

Out of a pool of over 1,400 entries, a panel of experts in photography, film, geography, and the environment have chosen the Earth Photo 2023 shortlist.

The exhibition opens at the Royal Geographical Society in London, from June 17th to August 23rd, 2023. Additionally, the exhibition will be showcased at five Forestry England sites across the country, from June 23rd, 2023, to January 28th, 2024.

The Earth Photo exhibition will embark on a remarkable tour, touching eyeballs at the Sidney Nolan Trust in Herefordshire, from July 13th to September 30th, 2023, followed by the enchanting Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, from February 1st to March 1st, 2024. And last but not least, it will grace the esteemed Lishui International Photography Festival in China this December 2023.

Billy would like to extend his thanks to Earth Photo, who work in partnership with Forestry England, Parker Harris and the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).

Earth Photo tells compelling stories about our planet, its inhabitants, its beauty, fragility, and resilience. For more information, please click here.

A Critical Essay from Hammad Nasar

Hammad Nasar, co-curator (with Irene Aristizábal) of British Art Show 9 (2020–2022), lead curator of Turner Prize (2021), wrote a critical essay on Billy’s recent exhibition, [TRAVELLER, YOUR FOOTPRINTS], held at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham. You can read the review below and details about the exhibition can be found here.

Billy Dosanjh and the Quest to Settle

By Hammad Nasar

What do we know about migrant memories? What imaginative, material and relational worlds do immigrants build in new and often hostile lands? What stories do they tell each other? How do they share these stories across generations, and between communities of different cultural heritages? What contextual knowledge informs how people understand these stories? In what ways do they seep into the wider cultural landscape? 

These questions rose like thought bubbles over the works of Billy Dosanjh in his most ambitious exhibition to date, [Traveller, Your Footprints], curated by Melanie Kidd at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham (23 Sep 2022–7 Jan 2023). The exhibition brought together three bodies of work – one of the artist’s earliest films, Year Zero: Black Country (2014); one of his most recent, Indi (2022); and, the photo series, Exiles (2019–22). These works were separated by time and medium, but united by Dosanjh’s commitment to art as a form of storytelling, with Year Zero playing the same role for the works that follow as the ‘mother dough’ or ‘starter’ does in the production of fresh loaves of sourdough bread – a source of potentially endless future production. For the purpose of this short text, I will address Year Zero and Dayshift (2019), the first image in the Exiles series, and consider what they reveal about Dosanjh’s wider artistic project.     

The hour-long Year Zero mixes television archives, shaky home movies and footage recorded by the artist to sketch out a polyphonic story of South Asian immigration to feed the foundries and industries of the Black Country in the last gasp of its industrial might in the 1960s. “All the shit jobs come from Smethwick” deadpans the voiceover near the beginning, and the film goes on to reveal the mostly single, illiterate or semi-literate working-class single men, who came to Britain to fill these roles, and their struggles to make the Black Country home. Dosanjh grew up in Smethwick, and as part of the process of making this film, invited members of his Punjabi community to join him in watching snippets from over a hundred hours of archival footage from the 1960s and 1970s. The footage became a series of visual prompts to trigger memories of the arduous business of making a life: full of labour, hardship, loneliness, and racism; but also, comradeship, resilience, humour and joy.

Year Zero probes at what it means to remember, and reminds us that remembering is a creative act. The work’s collage of more than twenty stories gleaned from Dosanjh’s communal screening sessions, may not always have an indexical relationship to historical fact, but they paint a complex picture that approaches a larger ‘truth’ than an enumeration of facts ever could. Narrations of these personal vignettes, each announced by black and white title shots in English and Punjabi (in Gurmukhi script), are used as voice over for archival footage. These diaristic reflections are interspersed with the supposed neutrality of news reporting and documentary footage–children playing in terraced streets; white neighbours agreeing and enforcing colour bars; and Malcolm X’s historic 1965 visit to Smethwick–whose language often echoes the hateful bile of Enoch Powell (“hordes”, “aliens”, “rivers of blood”), the local member of Parliament for neighbouring Wolverhampton. We may know these historic narratives, but familiarity does not dull the bite of the casual everyday racism, for instance, of the barber who refuses to serve his brown would-be customer (“its closed for you”). 

Much of the power of Year Zero is due to not just what is shown but how. Dosanjh, a graduate of the National Film School, cut his teeth on film and television documentaries before turning to the greater liberties offered by visual art. We can see, hear and feel the affective range these skills and experience make possible in the complex sound design, editing and confident varying of speed he plays with in Year Zero. A short sequence towards the end brings these gifts together and takes us effortlessly from the documentation of a nightclub performance by an elastic-limbed brown disco dancer into almost abstract reverie of sound and image, reminding us of both the beauty and the banality of our everyday performance of self. As soon as the film finishes, one is tempted to stay seated to watch its rich mixture of sound, image and feeling again to better understand what went on then, and how it makes us feel now. 

The Exiles series is the artist’s attempt at finding new visual forms to stay with some of the stories of Year Zero. Informed by the work of artists like Gregory Crewdson, Stan Douglas and Tracey Moffatt, the Exiles photographs are elaborately staged, with scripts, lighting rigs and carefully cast characters. Dosanjh has described this way of working as making ‘single shot movies’ – a phrase that captures his investment in the cinematic intent behind each image. In these images is also a search for a visual language that honours the nobility of the migration stories that nurtured Dosanjh and those of his generation who grew up in the Black Country.

Dayshift is the first and most elaborately staged of the Exiles series. It has been shot along a row of two-up, two-down terraced houses in the Black Country Living Museum; street scenes familiar to us from Year Zero. Dayshift has been shot from a height. Its scale (110 x 135 cm) offers us a voyeur’s view–like that of the curtain-twitching neighbour peeping from the upstairs window in the centre of Dayshift–into each of the many stories playing out in adjacent back rooms and gardens. One can trace these to the narrated stories in Year Zero: the young South Asian dandy’s furtive romance with a young white woman with her back to us; two visibly nervous, turbaned figures on the verge of beheading a (taxidermied) swan with a machete; or the man lurking at the back with a bottle of Dr John Collis Browne’s cough mixture – an addictive blend of alcohol, opium, chloroform and cannabis used as a cure-all in times of war, but repurposed and widely used by immigrant communities to combat depression and loneliness.      

The golden sheen with which Dayshift is lit is an obvious reference to 17th Century Dutch painting; its so-called Golden Age. Dosanjh has also nodded to the inspiration of American photographer Todd Hido’s night shots, the cinematic portraits of Gregory Crewdson and the unsettling staged scenes of Tracey Moffat’s Up in the Sky (1997) series of photographs. But in Dayshift’s capacity to hold multiple fragmented narratives that toggle between inside and outside, light and dark, I also see the architectural treatment of space in South Asian miniature painting, and its contemporary refashioning in the works of artists like Gulammhammed Sheikh, Bhupen Khakhar, Shahzia Sikander and Imran Qureshi. As in miniature painting, Dosanjh too privileges multiple perspectives rather than a single point one, even though his images have been shot with a single lens.  

Exiles takes its title from Kent MacKenzie’s 1961 documentary about a group of young Native Americans who leave their reservation to move to a decaying part of Los Angeles in the 1950s. It is worth noting that many of Dosanjh’s artistic references are from artists associated with settler-colonies – Tracey Moffat and Shaun Tan are Australian; Stan Douglas and Cornelius Krieghoff, Canadian; and Gregory Crewdson and Todd Hido, American. Collectively their work engages with what it means to arrive at a new place, and to make a life there with people who may be different from you. To settle.

In postwar Britain, we have yet to develop a set of cohesive stories around the South Asian immigrant experience. Unlike immigrant communities from the Caribbean, there is no unifying story of the MS Windrush to serve as a near-mythic point of origin. A single point perspective is impossible to address the complexities of faith, caste and class of people of South Asian cultural heritage in Britain. Even the geography of ‘South Asia’ is contested given the historic movement of indentured South Asian labour within the British Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries (for instance, to Africa, East Asia and the Caribbean); the 1947 partition of British India into independent nations of India and Pakistan; and, the 1971 creation of Bangladesh from what was previously East Pakistan.

By firmly planting his artistic project in the working class, post-industrial, communities of South Asian heritage in the Black Country, Dosanjh has taken on the task of creating a new form of ‘settler art’. In our post-Brexit times of divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric, echoing Enoch Powell, and often most stridently voiced by UK-born politicians from South Asian heritage immigrant families, Dosanjh’s artistic project seems not just timely, but an urgent cultural conversation. Without settling the past, there is no clear way forward.

Dayshift (2019), from Exiles series

Year Zero Black Country (2014) - trailer

Billy Wins RBSA Photograhic Prize for Dayshift & Seamstress

The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA) Photography Prize Exhibition is hosted biennially to celebrate photographic art. Featuring 100 works from over 70 artists, this exhibition showcases the best of contemporary photography with the inclusion of both established and emerging photographers.

Two of Billy’s pieces, Dayshift and Seamstress, were entered into the competition, for which he was awarded first prize. Billy commented:

“To win the main prize felt a real coup for the identity I assert in my work - Royal Birmingham Society of Artists was established in 1821 with members like John Everett Millais and other painters whose work I study when entering my imaginings. This place is the deep soul of Birmingham and the Black Country. I’m glad to be in its thrall for a while.

Huge thanks to my team of craftspeople and producers, and funders who make the art happen. They really are epic productions. The works glisten in this space”.

The show is on until April 8th at Brook Street in the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham. There are some really fabulous works in a wide range of styles, techniques, and practices on display. Click here for more information.

You’ll be glad you visited!

The Exiles exhibition launches at the New Art Gallery in Walsall

Billy’s ambitious new body of photographic works pay tribute to those largely male migrant workers, especially those from the British colonies of South Asia, who came to The Black Country in the 1960s, to a region in the last throes of its industrial might, to find work and to create a new life for themselves.

Billy has drawn on his lived experience and the rich and vibrant stories told by his family and community to explore what happens when cultures merge and to create a visual vernacular for a history that has inextricably shaped our region forever.

Using filmic principles - elaborate, large scale lighting, set builds, and cinematic references - to make an original photographic series - The Exiles. The first image was an enormous production in 2019 for what was in principle a single shot movie. The remainder of the series was shot in 2022 after a series of pauses due to lockdown.

The show runs from 11th November 2022 – 6th February 2023. More information can be found here.

In Conversation:  Saturday 28 January, 2pm, Free.

Join Billy Dosanjh with Head of Exhibitions, Deborah Robinson for an informal tour of the exhibition followed by a screening of Billy’s short film Lumbu, the story of a young boy which was largely shot in Caldmore.

Please book your free place at the Reception Desk or book via Eventbrite.

Billy Dosanjh in conversation with Melanie Kidd - 4 November 2022

At the beginning of November I was invited by Melanie Kidd, Head of Exhibitions at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham, to talk about the last 10 years of my creative practise. The talk coincides with my exhibition which is being shown there until the 7th of January 2023. We spoke before a full house and a couple dozen attendees online too - thanks to the entire team for making the evening run so smoothly.

After a six month course at the School of Myth this year, hearing ancient oral stories, a clearer language round my work has appeared - in Joseph Campbell speak, the business of severance, threshold & return - and the psyche work inherent in journeys through the otherworld, journeys akin to the great migratory adventures our species have repeatedly embarked on, like the footprints of my ancestors, now scattered on Black Country’s scorched earth.

The talk is busy with artistic references; the eponymous The Exiles, a 60s docu-drama following Native Americans who leave reservations for Bunker Hill in LA, from nature based ways to a pummelling in capitalist straitjackets; to Tracey Moffat’s searing recreations of early Aussie outback life, of Aboriginal families dispossessed of their children; to paintings by Cornelius Krieghoff and Frederick McCubbin of early European settlements in Newfoundlands. I could go on and do in the talk.

You can watch the talk below. I hope you find it nourishing.

New Art Exchange Press Release

New exhibition at New Art Exchange

Billy Dosanjh [Traveller, Your Footprints]

23 September 2022 – 7 January 2023

Billy Dosanjh is an artist, filmmaker and storyteller whose practice pays tribute to every displaced person. His new, solo exhibition [Traveller, Your Footprints] opens on 23 September at New Art Exchange, Nottingham.

Born and raised in the Black Country area of the West Midlands, Dosanjh has built a body of work that explores the lives of South Asian empire workers who arrived in this blue-collar region in the last throes of its industrial might. Drawn from his lived experience and the stories recounted by his family and community, Dosanjh’s work documents and poetically interprets the incredible journeys of these marginalised individuals and the generations that followed them. In doing so, Dosanjh brings to the fore an important yet missing visual vernacular of a people and place.

The exhibition begins with Dosanjh’s seminal film, Year Zero: Black Country (2014), which transports the viewer to the 1960s as thousands of economic migrants from the former colonies travel to the industrial heartlands of England in search of jobs, fortune, and a new life. Comprised of archive materials and filmed scenes, Year Zero captures the psychology and sensations of this epic upheaval. Through the film, local anecdotes, characters and stories emerge which Dosanjh expands upon through the photo series, Exiles (2019 – 2022). These large-scale photographs appear as digitally manipulated images of miniature villages or maquettes, when in fact they are created by a laborious process involving sets, a cast of actors, costumes and theatrical lighting. Through the intriguing and uncanny, freeze-frame quality of Exiles, Dosanjh cleverly draws the viewers’ attention to a distinct context and character, presses ‘pause’ and invites you to peer into the protagonist’s soul.

Traversing through time, Dosanjh’s focus shifts to the next generation, in the newly commissioned film, Indi (2022). Set in the 1990’s Indi charts the world of emigre mother, Sheeru, and her British born, teenage son, Indi, who dreams of playing football for England. The work questions how life choices are shaped by your environment, and addresses the complexities of living across opposing cultures, traditions and identities.

--ENDS--

 

Press Contact

For more information, please contact: Maria Narducci, maria@nae.org.uk 07760 245240

Billy Dosanjh [TRAVELLER, YOUR FOOTPRINTS] Solo Exhibition

It’s been a busy couple of months for Billy and his team. They have been working towards the completion of two projects which will both be feature in his solo exhibition [TRAVELLER, YOUR FOOTPRINTS]. The exhibition is being held at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham from the 23rd September 2022 - 7th January 2023.

The exhibition features a series of works starting with his seminal film, Year Zero: Black Country (2014), which transports the viewer to the 1960s as thousands of economic migrants from the former colonies travel to the industrial heartlands of England in search of jobs, fortune, and a new life. You will also be able to view his photo series, Exiles (2019 – 2022) which has the addition of four more photos with a similar focus of migration to the West Midlands during the 60s and 70. Finally, we traverse through time to the modern day with his newly commissioned film, Indi (2022). Set in the 1990’s Indi charts the world of emigre mother, Sheeru, and her British born, teenage son, Indi, who dreams of playing football for England. The work questions how life choices are shaped by your environment, and addresses the complexities of living across opposing cultures, traditions and identities.

Billy is hugely proud and thankful to the team, firstly because it has taken a lot of hard work to secure funding for the projects and secondly because covid has meant the film start dates were delayed considerably.

More information about the exhibition can be found here.

Exiles Filming Update

This month our team photographed the remaining prompts in our fine art series Exiles, funded by The Arts Council, Multistory and The New Art Gallery Walsall. The work is now in post-production in Berlin where our brilliant Massachusetts retoucher and printer Nathan Baker is compositing the 4 images.

Production took place over 4 magical days in May as our team of producers, runners, security, technicians, craftsmen and women, and our locally assembled casts came to the fore to generate a once in a lifetime creative burst. It was food for the soul. Our homage to the experiences of the 10,000 empire workers who arrived to these streets around the time man landed on the moon.

It was a buzz to create again, to be free of lockdowns and able to spend the money we were funded years ago. The cast members were drawn in from online casting and street casting, and they gave their all to achieve the art we went for. We’re eternally grateful to their creative spirits.

Location pictures below and more on Billy’s Facebook page.

Busy, Busy, Busy

These past few months have been a voyage in filmmaking, bringing the mid 90s in Sandwell to life with the movie Lumbu, funded by BFI ad BBC Films, and then journeying through Cameroon, to tell the untold story of that fabulous football team, the Green Lions. It’s been an intense creative period that will now involve just as intense an edit process. Please do check out images from the shoots on my website.

Meanwhile, we’ve been preparing our creative storytelling workshop with BCLM which we deliver on Feb 28th and dates are accruing for various art showings and art making experiences across the year.

It’s going to be a big one!

Billy Offered a Part Time Associate Lecturer Post at Goldsmiths University

Billy is thrilled to announce that he has taken up a post as part time Associate Lecturer teaching on an MA Screen Documentary programme at Goldsmiths University.

Billy is looking forward to teaching and passing on his experience to students from all over the globe. Bringing their own unique creative energies, which he will encourage and support over the academic year.

A lively and nourishing environment to work in

Image of Goldsmiths University

Two Short Film - Open Casting

Raucous Pictures are conducting a major search of the West Midlands area for two boys of South East Asian descent (i.e. Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi) to star as the lead in one of two short films funded by the British Film Institute, BBC Films and Film London. The films are to be directed by me.

No formal acting experience is needed to apply.

  • Unrepresented boys or non-actor boys of any Southeast Asian origin

  • Male 12 yrs – 17 yrs

  • Boys from the Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall and Wolverhampton area

The Films

LUMBU: The dramatic story of ‘Lumbu’ and best friend Ravi as the navigate the consequences of a long-held family secret finally becoming known. 

INDI FOR ENGLAND: The heartfelt story of Britain’s first great hope as a professional South Asian footballer, his desi Mum, his preoccupied Dad, and the sport he loves. 

How to Apply

We would like you to start by introducing yourself and telling us a bit about who you are - your age, school, where you live, what you enjoy doing and basically what makes you tick in life! Do this on yours or a friends mobile phone and either email us using the subject matter ‘Short Films’ or send us your introduction via whatspp.

Here are the contact details:

E: komachall@hotmail.co.uk I WHATSAPP: 07983 820765

We will respond to each applicant to acknowledge receipt, and follow up with more information.

Boys who are under 17yrs should have a parent or guardian apply for them. Thank you for your time

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Mind the Gaps - Flatpack Film Festival Talk

"Film and TV archives only give us part of the picture. This is an opportunity to hear from two people who are adept at navigating these collections, and drawing out the untold stories which can fall through the gaps.”

Nirmal Puwar and I were part of a talk organised by Ian Francis of Flatpack. We also discussed our experiences of working with cine archive. The talk is now available to view on Vimeo and you can view it by clicking here.

Nirwal is Reader in Sociology, at Goldsmiths, University of London and the author of 'Space Invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place' (2004). Nirwal’s formative Coventry cinema experiences formed the basis of a collaborative series of short films and exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery

 
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Wells Art Contemporary 2021

Really pleased our art work “Dayshift” has been selected for the 2021 Wells Contemporary Art Exhibition. Open to artists working in painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, installation or video from all over the world, it's a privilege to participate in this visual arts competition.

Th exhibition coincides with the launch of a new Anthony Gormley artwork. Cast in iron, the work is just over life-size and will occupy an empty niche below the North-West tower of the cathedral.

The virtual exhibition opens on the 2nd August - 26 September and actual exhibition opens on the 28th August 2021 at Wells Cathedral”

 
 

London Creative Network

Billy, alongside Professor Eve Ess from Ruskin School of Art, were recently given the opportunity to asses and critique work from some really inspiring artists all of whom are working in different and novel ways through covid.

Prolonged grief and mental health were recurring themes, with some genuinely powerful film work, sculpture and painting. 

Flatpack Festival: Mind The Gap

This year’s Flatpack Festival is a ten-day virtual feast of film, performance and special events, accessible from anywhere in the world. There are numerous events available including live audiovisual performances, films paired with life modelling, collage workshops and craft beer, as well as a whole lot of incredible filmmaking from around the globe.

Billy is taking part on the 25th of May from 18:00 - 19:30. He will be talking about how film and TV archives only give us part of the picture of the many untold stories which can fall through the gaps.

To book tickets please click here.

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Film London Masterclass: An Introduction to Artists Working With Film

On the 29th April at 1pm Billy is taking part in a masterclass run by FLAMIN & Film London's Equal Access Network: An Introduction to Artists Working with Film.

Billy is joined by two other artists Onyeka Igwe and Anita Safowaa and all three will share their work as well as tips on how to kickstart your own career as an artist filmmaker.

For more info and to book tickets please click here.

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