Art Is + Vithya Subramaniam

SP Blog’s series "Art Is +" is an attempt to view art through the eyes of artists and writers themselves. In wide-ranging interviews with vital new artists and writers from both Asia and the USA, the series ushers these voices to the forefront, contextualizing their work with the experiences, processes, and motivations that are unique to each individual artist. "Art Is +" encourages viewers and readers to appreciate art as the multitude of ways in which artists and writers continually engage with our world and the variety of spaces they occupy in it. Read our interviews with Symin Adive, Geraldine Kang, Paula Mendoza, Zining Mok, JinJin Xu, Leonard Yang, Monique Truong, and Noorlinah Mohamed.

Vithya Subramaniam is the creator of Thamizhachi: A Digital Museum of Tamil Women Under Construction and writer-performer of Rasanai: An Invitation to Appreciate, both of which are being shown as part of Festival of Women N.O.W. 2021. She is presenting both of these pieces as a founding member of Brown Voices, a collective of Singapore Indian playwrights. In this interview, Subramaniam shares some of her current thoughts on what it means to “represent” communities, wrestling with questions about tokenism, authority, and materialities. Shining a light on the process of putting together a collaborative museum that is designed to stay open to change and is ever-evolving, Subramaniam highlights the individuality and agency of Singaporean Tamil women that animates the objects in and of this exhibition.

Thamizhachi can now be viewed at https://www.notordinarywork.com/thamizhachi-by-brown-voices and welcomes public suggestions/contributions.

[Image courtesy of Vithya Subramaniam.]

This interview is one of two that we had the pleasure of doing with two of the many amazing women behind N.O.W. 2021. Read our interview with Noorlinah Mohamed, Artistic Director of N.O.W., here.

“that is the first step—to guide people in recognising
that they too have a voice and a hand in crafting the image
of themselves and their community.”

Jade Onn: In your bio on the Not Ordinary Work (N.O.W.) website, you are credited as the creator of Thamizhachi and as a Writer-Performer for Rasanai, but these are just the latest projects that you’re adding to an already impressive resume in creative and socially-engaged work, including facilitating the Migrant Workers Community Museum earlier this year. When/how did you begin your work in organizing for Indian communities in Singapore?

Vithya Subramaniam: Thank you for recognising that work too. I’ve not really thought of my work as ‘organising for’ the community. That’s interesting to me that you’d think so. My work on the Indian community in Singapore probably started around 2013. At that time I was an Honours Year undergraduate with the South Asian Studies Programme at NUS [National University of Singapore], working on my thesis on memory in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. A friend introduced me to my would-be collaborator who was interested in documenting local Sikh history. From that came the Sikh Heritage Trail mobile application which maps sites of Sikh history in Singapore.

JO: What are some of the challenges that you have faced/face in doing this critical work of gathering and amplifying marginalized voices? 

VS: The first challenge is a happy one, particularly for the educator in me. We, in general, are used to works that make representations. But we are less familiar with thinking about and confronting the power behind those representations. So that is the first step—to guide people in recognising that they too have a voice and a hand in crafting the image of themselves and their community.

There’s a second challenge that used to annoy me but that I’ve learnt recently to see some beauty in, and that is the question of audience. When we (as minority subjects) make a piece about us (the minority subject), who do and who should we want to make this for? Who is our imagined audience? Should it be just ‘us’ the in-group? Or should it be ‘them’, those who presumably need to learn about ‘us’? I still oscillate on my answer. I’m still not sure if telling ‘them’ everything about ‘us’ is the way; if I’m making just another feel-good avenue for superficial participation points, or if there even is an ‘us’ to begin with. So yeah… the imagined audience is my second happy challenge.

Thamizhachi: A Digital Museum of Tamil Women Under Construction Digital Poster. Courtesy of N.O.W. 2021

JO: How did the idea for Thamizhachi come about, and can you tell us more about the journey of bringing it to life, as it is now?

VS: As we began thinking about crafting a piece for Festival of Women N.O.W., we knew we wanted it to do the work as well as question the work of representing Singaporean Tamil women. The museum form is something I think about very often because of my academic interest and so it came up as an ideal medium. Leveraging on the recognised authority of the museum form gave this piece of representation, of place-claiming, some semblance of legitimacy. At the same time, it was very important to me that we not end up repeating the top-down, faceless hand of the ‘traditional’ museums that harness a lot of their ‘authority’ from illusions of grandeur and by keeping power exclusive. Thus, collaboration was inbuilt into the process with the museum-making workshops, and is inbuilt into the digital museum itself with avenues for further suggestions and comments.

JO: As I was navigating through this online exhibition, I was really struck by the responses (or “Notes”) to the “object” that is the word “Thamizhachi,” and how different Tamil women responded to and engaged with it. In putting together this exhibition, were there any comments/responses that opened up a new perspective for you, or that you didn’t quite expect?  

VS: Initially, there were a few objects that I thought of as ‘tokens’, that are so entrenched in the stereotypical representation of the Tamil woman in Singapore, that I was hesitant to include them in the museum or table them for consideration, for fear of reproducing that tokenised image. What I did not expect was to see how often our participants related to these objects as far more than simple reproducers of culture or tradition. These women saw an object like the sari or thali, and instead had discussions on personal choice, on selective performance and agency over their identities. So I learned to see those ‘tokens’ differently too.

“Who is our imagined audience?
Should it be just ‘us’ the in-group? Or should it be ‘them’,
those who presumably need to learn about ‘us’?
I still oscillate on my answer.”

JO: How would you describe your own relationship with the word “Thamizhachi” and what it means to you?

VS: Thanks for this question. The strange thing is, I did not and still do not think I have a discernible relationship to the word. I was not a Tamil-language student in school and so was only on the peripheries of Tamil conversations, so this was not a term that was used on or around me very much. What I do love about the term is that it is most at home in the colloquial register, where I too am comfortable; where the boundaries between Tamil, English, and Malay aren’t policed; where one nonchalantly claims space; where one is unabashedly present.

JO: What was the very first object that went into the construction of the Thamizhachi exhibition? 

VS: Probably a notebook or scraps of paper with my handwritten notes. If you consider digital objects, then there’s a variety of word documents and excel sheets. But after these objects that help enact the construction, there are also the objects that help inform the museum collection. One of the first amongst these is my mother’s birth certificate. I was looking for objects to start a conversation in the workshop, and wanted one that spelled out our identity. The NRIC is an obvious example, but I remembered seeing my mother’s birth certificate and how it had listed my grandfather as ‘British Subject’ and my grandmother as ‘British Protected Person’. Together with their ‘Place of Birth’, ‘Occupation’, and the syntax of all their names, that document worked to tell a story of migration and of my family’s place in the British State of Singapore. I did not tell the participants whose it was until after their discussion, but that piece of paper was highly effective in facilitating our mini exercise in recognising stories within objects during the workshops with the participants.

“Thamizhachi”. Courtesy of Thamizhachi: A Digital Museum of Tamil Women Under Construction

JO: Is there an object that isn’t already in the exhibition but that animates your own life as an individual Singaporean Tamil Woman? 

VS: Probably coffee, and I’m not trying to play the typical caffeine-desperate academic/artist/millennial. Coffee was something a few of us discussed in the workshop—we were talking about what specific image we identify with, whether it be the printed paper to-go cup, Indian filter coffee in a steel tumbler, or the dark brown ambrosia in a plastic bag with really thin straps. Every day, when I order my ‘kopi C siu dai’ (black coffee with sugar and less condensed milk), I perform a social ritual of reaffirming my voice, place, and tastes as a Singaporean. Kopitiam (local cofeeshop)-style kopi was also the one thing I immediately and desperately missed when I was overseas for school.

JO: The Thamizhachi exhibition echoes your academic interests in “memory and materialities” as an Anthropology student. How has academia shaped your work and outlook as an artist, and vice versa? 

VS: This is hard to pinpoint because I’ve not really seen both these roles as starkly different. Both seek fundamentally to communicate something complex, something ‘in our heads’ to an external audience. Both, at least the way I practice, seek to involve rather than alienate. Both seek to journey with the thinking more than to arrive at a definitive end point.

If there is one thing I do far more consciously these days, having gotten more immersed in anthropological thinking, it is to stay conscious of subject positions, both mine and my interlocutors. Meaning, I also think of how one is related to the subject on hand. Am I of the community in question? Do I, say, share the community’s minority status? Am I in a position of power vis-à-vis the subject?

“What I do love about the term is that it is most at home
in the colloquial register, where I too am comfortable;
where the boundaries between Tamil, English, and Malay aren’t policed; where one nonchalantly claims space; where one is unabashedly present.”

JO: Thamizhachi is described as “ever-evolving” and “perpetually ‘under construction.” Where do you see this project going and, on that same note, what’s next for you?  

VS: Thanks for asking this. I am going to be working with objects and materialities for at least the next two years as I enter fieldwork for my DPhil thesis. To that end, I will be running a series of research workshops, during Brown Voices’ residency with C42 [Centre 42], on the material experience and expression of ‘Singaporean Indian-ness’. This exploration will also inform my next playscript. Right this moment, I am working on yet another exhibition, this time on the ‘papers’ that animate the lives of Tamil migrant men who ply their trade as tailors. This consideration of things made of paper as well as the idea of documentation, will be on display as part of Esplanade’s Red Dot August 2021.


A recent implant from Singapore via New York, Jade Onn is currently pursuing her MA/PhD in English Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in an attempt to further articulate the circulation and rhetorics of Singaporean anglophone literatures. In her free time, she indulges in plant propagation and nostalgia.