Sandeep Johal: What If?

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Sandeep Johal, "Laxmi Bai, Selvi, and Phoolan Devi," 2021

digital drawings

Sandeep Johal: What If? 

Drop-In Launch of Fall Exhibits: Saturday, September 18, 7–9 p.m.

Artist Talk: Saturday, October 9, 2–3 p.m.

Both the drop-in launch on September 18 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. and artist talk on October 9 from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. will have limited live seating at the Gallery. Admission is free. Formal remarks at the drop-in launch will begin at 7:30 p.m. The artist talk will be available for replay on the Gallery’s YouTube channel after October 21.

Through textiles, paintings, drawings, and animation, Johal layers her personal history with those of South Asian women she wished she knew about as a first-generation South Asian youth. These women are role models, pioneers, trailblazers, vigilantes, and rebels.

Upon entering the Gallery, the visitor steps into Johal’s bright pink retrospective teenage bedroom that she reclaims as a feminist space. The room pulses with the question What if? What if her formative influences had been daring, defiant South Asian women? Why were such figures unseen and unheard of in both private and public spheres? Johal revisits, reimagines, and reclaims her past by sharing these women’s stories through art.

In her Hard Kaur series, Johal highlights thirteen women. Examples include Phoolan Devi, a bandit queen; Sophia Duleep Singh, a suffragette; Laxmi Bai, leader of the Indian Rebellion of 1857; Sampat Pal Devi, founder of the vigilante group called the Gulabi Gang; and Jayaben Desai, leader of one of the largest worker’s strikes in London. These five women replace the Spice Girls in a tapestry that Johal weaves from her mother’s saris. The artist positions the five South Asian women in a similar way to how the five members of the 1990s British pop group posed in one of their promotional posters. The other Hard Kaur female figures are referenced on the wallpaper or via symbolic objects in the room, alongside current influential South Asian women like novelist Shauna Singh Baldwin.

Hard Kaur is a play on words: "kaur” is a typical middle name assigned to Sikh females at birth which means “lioness,” replacing "core" in the term "hard core" while retaining the same meaning. In her reimagined teenage bedroom, Johal debunks the traditional stereotypes of South Asian women as either coy Bollywood starlets (objects of desire) or victims of gender-based violence (objects of pity). She brings these women together to fill a representational void by centering women and redressing their erasure.

Johal says, “Hard Kaur is a body of work dedicated to women from India's past and present who have taken up space to achieve extraordinary (albeit sometimes controversial) things, despite having been born into a culture of systemic gender inequity, oppression, and violence that still persists.”

No stranger to addressing gendered violence through her art, Johal brings murdered women’s stories to life through Rest in Power. This series of twelve goddesses is rendered in Johal’s distinct black and white graphic line drawing style with colourful geometric patterns and shapes. The Selector of Souls by Shauna Singh Baldwin had a strong influence on Johal, inspiring her to depict several versions of the fictional goddess from the novel. Each drawing or painting represents a woman who has been murdered, including Natsumi Kogawa in Vancouver (2016) and Maple Batalia in Surrey (2011). 

Johal shares her motivation for the series: “I didn’t want to portray these women as victims but to share their stories through a lens of empowerment and to keep their legacy and memories alive.”

Assistant Curator Suvi Bains says: “Surrey has a South Asian diaspora community. It’s important to see our community represented through art exhibits that address difficult subjects and uplift resilient women.”

In What If?  Johal gives South Asian girls a different story to grow up with, celebrating feminist resistance while creating space for alternative narratives. She returns to the past and invites the visitor to come along and imagine a different future—a better future. What If? is a quest for self-discovery and reconnection to past heritage.

About Sandeep Johal

Sandeep Johal is a Vancouver-based visual artist whose colorful forms and intricate black and white line work are aesthetically and conceptually inspired by her South Asian heritage. Johal believes in the power of art to create awareness around issues related to cultural identity, gender equality, and human rights. Her art practice is an expression of her social and cultural concerns, particularly gender justice.