Seema Kapur

The film series Remembering Apna Punjab is a suite of five works, each named after a river in the Northern Indian state of Punjab where JHELUM, CHENAB, and BEAS, were filmed. RAVI and SUTLEJ were shot in my family’s homes located in New Delhi and Wisconsin. In each I have selected an American hip-hop song, translated it into Punjabi, and had it re-told by native speakers of that language.  The multi-layered works address broad themes about the limitations of language, and whether or not a voice of resistance can be transferred across cultures. Perhaps more acutely, in evidence of the fact that I have inserted myself into the works, the videos embody the personal dislocation experienced by an individual searching for home within multiple worlds.

In March of 2015, I orchestrated a performance with a classically trained Tenor vocalist in which I descended 3 flights in a concrete stairwell, blindfolded, towards the sound of his voice on the landing below. This performance took place at the Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta Canada.

In June of 2016, I returned from Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where I collaborated with the arts-organization Square Root Collective, creating a series of site-specific actions on a former colonial-era Japanese military base. These performances took place outside the abandoned houses that are in HuangPu Village. 

I am currently working on a series of performances crossing bridges building on the ideas of border/boundary and place. 

In the Spring of 2014, I returned to rural Wisconsin to the town in which was born and raised. While there I visited four different spaces that defined my childhood experience as part of the only family of color in a town of 6000 people. My catholic elementary school playground, the woods I played in near the Mullet River, the backyard of my childhood house, and my high school parking lot. In each place growing up, I experienced repeated encounters with racism. I spent one day in each space and allowed myself to move spontaneously within it, doing whatever felt natural in the moment. Nothing was prepared or rehearsed prior to going there and I documented whatever happened without editing. This site-specific durational performance was held in Plymouth, WI USA. 

One Woman Nutcracker is a non-ballet meditation done in 3 parts. Through organic movement and repetition, my body became the vessel to depict stories of love, loss, and self-recognition. This performance took place in 2014 at Machine Project's Mystery Theater in Los Angeles with the help of Kate Brown, Sara Roberts, and Haruko Tanaka.

Ema’s Opus’ consists of a collection of four short films that expose different aspects of Ema – the main character and my alter ego.  Each work is a performance constructed for film as the medium.  Ema’s performances are conceptualized “stories” depicting and questioning issues of identity, normality, silence, and femininity.

Each film can be viewed as a cohesive body of work or individually depending on the given context. All four films were shot and edited on 16mm color film.