Sarindar Dhaliwal combines the personal, the political, and the fantastical in her AGO retrospective

Sarindar Dhaliwal's new career retrospective, "When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Namer of Paint Colours" — on now at the Art Gallery of Ontario — is aptly named. The show, which features Dhaliwal's work from the 1980s into the 2010s, is an explosion of colour, with bright pinks, deep reds, vivid greens and saffrons throughout.

Dhaliwal was born in Punjab, India and raised in England before eventually settling in the Eastern Ontario hamlet of Munster with her family as a teenager. She credits her love of bright hues, in part, to her heritage, pointing to an old quote from former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland by way of explanation. 

"She once said, 'Pink is the navy blue of India,'" says Dhaliwal. "It's part of the background, growing up with women who wear very interesting colours for weddings and so on. So I think it's just seeped into my life in that way."

But she says it was also a rebellion against minimalism. In her 20s, Dhaliwal returned to England to pursue a BFA. When she applied she was coming from a craft background, rather than a fine art one, and says that she was admitted on the strength of a portfolio that included things like her very colourful weaving. Once she was admitted, however, they went about trying to stamp that out of her.

"One of the interviewers was particularly taken with my weavings," she says. "He kept saying 'Oh, they're so free, they're so joyous.' But in the sculpture department, they were minimalists, and so they didn't like the fact that I used materials which I dyed in very strong colours, and I built forms that they equated with craft, even though they weren't. They were huge and you couldn't find them in a craft shop."

Dhaliwal's work often looks at issues of history, identity and culture. One of those is "Hey Hey Paula," featuring 544 photos from New York Times wedding announcements from the 1980s and '90s. Each one features a smiling woman, wearing pearls. In the middle sits a rotary phone, which plays the 1960s pop song "Hey Hey Paula" when you pick it up. Dhaliwal says that, previously, she'd done work looking at arranged marriages in a South Asian context, but that when she looked at these wedding announcements, she realized they were also often arranged marriages of a sort. 

"The grandson of the president of one bank would marry the granddaughter of the president of the other bank," she explains. "I did begin to realize that every woman in that piece is wearing a pearl necklace. I felt a bit like somebody from National Geographic, finding this tribe in northeastern part of the States who have this ritual that when they're engaged or married, they have to wear pearls."

She adds that, while she was making the piece, another artist — who came from an affluent background — saw it and began to interpret the pearls for her.

"She could look at those pearls in each picture and tell me how much they were worth," says Dhaliwal. "So I also began to understand that there are codes for so many things in the world. Like, for example, turbans. And I have made pieces about turbans, because there's so many different ways of tying them. And if you know your turbans, you can tell that that's a Sikh who was raised in Uganda and so on. I feel like many Sikhs can probably read turbans in a way that other people can't."

In her series "The Cartographer's Mistake," Dhaliwal combines magic and fantasy with Indian political history. Cyril Radcliffe was a British barrister who, in 1947, was tasked with dividing British India into the newly independent countries of India and Pakistan. Radcliffe had never been to India before, had no experience in cartography, and was given only five weeks to complete the task, while under great pressure from British, Indian, and Pakistani politicians. In the series, Dhaliwal imagines Radcliffe being reincarnated as a series of birds at different points in space and time.

"He was either a lark or finch and they live in a room that belongs to a character in Dickens' Bleak House. So that's 1852," she says. "The piece in the show, the ceramic letter piece, he's a parrot in 1910, travelling with Rudyard Kipling. He's lived in Sydney. He's lived in Venice. He's lived in a Punjabi village. In Sydney he was a baby cockatoo. In India he was a big owl in an abandoned village house. In Medicine Hat, in 1948, he was a canary and he was the pet of a war bride. She was very homesick for Britain. She would tell him all his sorrows, and then he would sing to her to try to cheer her up."

Ultimately, the thing that unites all Dhaliwal's work, she says, is that it draws heavily on a world of imagination, regardless of whether the subject matter is personal or political. And that, more than anything, is what she wants people to take away from her work.

"I think what I would like my work to do the most is to inspire children," she says. "So that they too can want to be an artist and understand that [art] is a world that can belong to you and in it, you can make your imagination come alive."

Sarindar Dhaliwal: When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Namer of Paint Colours runs at the Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas St. W.) in Toronto until Jan. 7, 2024.