Paul Nataraj

Paul Nataraj’s practice is an interrogation of the intra-active relationship between materiality, memory and sound, with a particular focus on the stories of migration, diaspora and postcolonial identity. He works with sound, text, speech and found sound, field recordings, modified and ‘cracked media’ in an attempt to capture a flake of the scalar, spatial and temporal shifts that constitute the complex ontologies woven into the multiple trajectories of postcolonial identities. He is currently part of the major touring exhibition Jerwood Survey III and his latest chapter is published in the book ‘Sonic Faction: Audio Essay as Medium and Method’ out now on Urbanomic.

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As a mixed-race person of colour, Paul is particularly interested in the legacy of tensions between communities after moments of national fractures and the ways in which people are able to articulate their relationships to these contested spaces of belonging. Their work has always focused on the ways in which creative practices and research can shift the hegemonic narratives around minority and migrant communities by empowering them to see their experiences and stories in a new light. Paul’s artistic practice brings together sets of materialities into dialogue through site specific installation, the use of objects, archived recordings, ethnographic interviews and a variety of compositional processes chosen depending on which technique is required to best produce a coherent conceptual outcome from the research collected. All of these elements are drawn upon to create work which seeks to express the complex relationships which are at work through the legacies of colonialism. They are particularly interested in challenging given notions about the legacies of colonialism, and its institutional processes of memorialisation which can be reductive and ignore more tangible impacts in terms of inter-community relations and people’s lived experiences.