Sujata Setia’s 'A Thousand Cuts' is a powerful and deeply personal artistic project that explores the hidden realities of domestic abuse within South Asian communities in the UK.
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00:00From my own personal experiences, there is a lot of stigma, there is a lot of shame attached
00:08to talking about your own abuse.
00:10Women for the longest time have been intellectually oppressed and it is not easy to come out of
00:15that oppression.
00:16The silencing is so deep, there is this burden of purity that is levied on women which comes
00:22in the way of us talking about our abuse every single time because we believe we need to
00:27hide it.
00:33My name is Sujata Setia, I am an Indian born British lens based artist.
00:37My recent series A Thousand Cuts is a study of domestic abuse within the South Asian culture.
00:43I have spoken with over 21 South Asian survivors of domestic abuse so far who have been based
00:50here in the UK itself.
00:52This work is born not only from my own personal lived experiences but also from the conversations
00:58that I have had with these survivors.
01:02When I met with the survivors through SheWISE UK charity, everybody came and said to me
01:10is it alright if you do not reveal our identity and for various reasons.
01:16Some of them were at a stage in their trauma journey where they felt that their pain was
01:21too deep for it to be revealed to the outside world.
01:24Some felt that they have moved on way past that trauma already so they don't want to
01:29associate it with their identity.
01:32So everybody was at a different journey and there were myriad reasons as to why they didn't
01:36want their identities to be revealed.
01:40I would sit with the survivors, I would have group interviews and through that then I started
01:46sitting one on one with each survivor to get deeper into their conversations, to understand
01:51the history, to understand where is it that they are coming from, what is their childhood
01:54all about because a lot of domestic abuse has to do with how you have lived your childhood.
02:01Through those conversations then we decided that we are going to have a very celebratory
02:04kind of a photo shoot with each survivor and following that photo shoot we would sit together
02:09and decide what are the images that they feel most associated with and on top of that images
02:14when I would start making the cuts.
02:16There is something that is very common between these narratives as well and the commonality
02:21is that every single survivor through that trauma is completely torn apart from within
02:28and how that trauma can pass on to generations and generations in the future.
02:35So that aspect of being completely torn apart from within is something that came through
02:40every single interview that I had with the survivors and that's what I wanted to reveal
02:44through the work and then that tearing apart is what I did literally.
02:49Literally picking up that metaphor and utilizing it on the prints.
02:58This work has taught me to look at myself and my own trauma also as an outsider and
03:05really study what those patterns are and how is it that those patterns can be stopped.
03:10That idea of making conversations around domestic abuse such a ghastly or a scary or
03:17an ugly subject that needs to be removed from society.
03:21It is a normal conversation.
03:23The more normalized this conversation becomes the easier it will be for people to get out
03:27and talk about it.