Physical Address
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Met was painful inside Walsall in that winter of 1962-3 when the snow turned the Black World into white. In After the Storm, Billy Dosanjh’s portrait of a cold night back in the day, an old Sikh man, who has just returned from Punjab, stands under an old lamp. He is, the picture shows, seeing snow for the first time.
“I thought it was a good time to have him looking at the snow, looking a little surprised,” says Dosanjh as we walk around Paths You Walk, his impressive exhibition of photographs, videos and installations at the New Art Gallery Walsall. Behind the statue, three piles of smoke from the furnace rise like ghosts, almost as if the three crosses of Calvary have been transferred to Mordor.
As in the picture, chimneys disappeared as Britain de-industrialised and the Black Country became a green country. In the 1960s, it was in those kilns that Punjabi men came to do the work that British whites did not want.
Like the other people who live in this and other images in this exhibition, the lonely man captured in his exhibition is represented by the community who, for almost 70 years, lived in the redbrick houses in the back of Caldmore, Palfrey, Pleck and The Butts – Walsall districts that saw many immigrants from South Asia.
With the help of a grant from the National Heritage Lottery Fund, Dosanjh collected oral memories from first- and second-generation immigrants and turned them into images that look like they were created by Black Country Edward Hopper, or political icon Jeff Wall.
Symbols of the time were carefully sought out in these images: Vimto ads, period cars, attractions. There was a market here that sold monkeys, pythons and rat snakes. The last of these will set you back £12, if the re-drawn – and hand-drawn – sign of the show informs us.
“When I do my work,” says Dosanjh, “I want people to step into their parents’ shoes emotionally.” Hence PayDay in which south Asian blokes appear in a decidedly early 1970s party (that didn’t use a bar to bar black and brown drinkers). Then there are the Punjabi men who fell to their knees being trained by their white captain at Furnacemen. Or Sikh friends round the braziers in Walsall at Dayshift. Again and again, what is remarkable is how Dosanjh finds beauty in images of isolation and disgust.
The Dosanjh family does this work. The Rainbow Cafe we see across the street from the Sikh man in After the Storm is a nod to his father’s business of the same name. The elder Dosanjh arrived from Punjab in 1967 at the age of 14. He was like many South Asians who traveled 8,000 kilometers to work in the Black Country. These single men and boys, most of whom knew little English, lived in overcrowded houses but, in contrast, made a good living for themselves. “By the time he was 17, Dad had bought a house and was working in museums, then he set up a cafe that used to have arcade games and a jukebox.
This was in 1981. Billy, who is now 45 years old, was born in Smethwick which, after leaving film school, became the center of his career. His 2016 BBC documentary The Sikhs of Smethwick showed how Ravi, a Punjabi Christian marries Sonia, a Sikh born and raised in the Black Country – a match that would never have happened before. In such incomprehensible ways, Britain has been a privileged country, and a country where apartheid has led to the disenchantment of immigrants.
Dosanjh’s portrayal of Sikh life resonates with the racist rhetoric now being deployed by right-wing politicians following the arrest this week of Vickrum Digwa for stabbing student Henry Nowak to death with a traditional Sikh knife.
Dosanjh is developing similar projects for Stoke and Nottingham. He is also hoping to make a film based on his own words about one of the most tragic times in recent West Midlands history: the 2005 race riots in the Birmingham boroughs of Lozells and Handsworth. “There was a Pakistani jewelry store and a fight broke out between the Caribbean and the Muslim guys who, after 7/7, got really confused.” With “7 / 7”, he refers to the bombings in London by four British Islamists who killed 52 people and injured more than 770. “I thought that I needed to make my film here, about this place, because everything is there – different communities living together, the kingdom, young people, confused people.”
I have one last question: what are you trying to do with this function? “I don’t feel more alive than when I’m in the middle of doing things like this,” he said as we left the show. It makes everyone feel better.
