Metro, Tina Jackson, 29 January 2008

Terror of Living and necessary Journey

A young Asian man with a rucksack has a tendency to make some people
twitchy. With a blend of provocation and sly humour, artist Jiva Parthipan
deliberately engages with cultural paranoia as he makes his entrance for his performance piece Terror of Living. He unloads his backpack to reveal flour, and talk about terrorism and its impact on his life as he cooks chapattis.

The piece was provoked by a news report about a foiled attempt by terrorists to make a bomb from ingredients including chapatti flour. ‘Indian cuisine is supposed to be the traditional food of this country,’
notes Sri Lankan born Parthipan. ‘So I’m eating, talking and demonstrating, all at the same time. The piece is about the images of terror and attitudes to it, and, on a personal level, the impact of terror and anti-terror on my personal life. 5’vebeen stopped and searched on a quite a lot of occasions and, in Sri Lanka, I’ve an uncle who was taken for questioning and then disappeared.’

The performance lecture that accompanies Terror of Living also tackles attitudes towards him as a young Asian man, and the issue of who gets to go where, and why. ‘Necessary Journey is about the privilege of travel,’ he says. It started when I was awarded an Arts Council fellowship to go to America and Mexico; I was one of the six artists and we were going to do a show about our travels. But, for a whole lot of bureaucratic reasons, my American visa got refused, so I did a piece about my failure to travel.’ Again, there is a wider context. ‘ In a globalised world, some people have more access to travel than others,’ he says. ‘Not all people have the same privileges. But I want to stress this is not about a young mans identity, and I don’t want the burden of identity thrust upon me. It’s is about power, really.’