Things of Desire

By Mike Landry

Diyan Achjadi's "We Expected Hysteria (Hark! Listen)."

Thanks to a recording error, my interview with Vancouver-based artist Diyan Achjadi ended up being 13 minutes of static. But I did want to get Achjadi in this week’s issue, because I’ve been a fan of her work for the past while now. And I think you should be a fan too.

In the latest incarnation of her “Girl” series, The Further Adventures of Girl, Achjadi’s protagonist continues to build her army. No longer fending for herself in a culture of violence and militarism, Achjadi’s girls now examine nationalism and group formation.

“I don’t see the Girl as the subject matter for my work, rather she’s a vehicle that I use to respond to what is around me. I keep returning to her as, at this point, I don’t think I have yet exhausted all the possibilities,” says Achjadi.

What’s interesting about the new work, and Achjadi’s focus on group formations, is how it is unclear whether her girls are a resistance movement or lemmings. The girls even wave a flag  and wear badges featuring their likeness. The ambiguous nature and flag are subtle ways to speak to the complicity in which many people unite, under any cause.

“If the work was more straightforward, it could be propaganda, and I am far more interested in critiquing/ playing with those conventions than using them whole.”

When she started with the Girl it was partially in reaction to the ways that toys and media made for children are gendered, and questioning those conventions. The work has become a vehicle for exploring possibilities inherent in using fiction. And Achjadi’s sees these works as a series of fictions or stories.

“While the work itself doesn’t necessarily have a specific feminist intent, what I make is informed by my own feminist perspective and by my own lived experience.

“I have always been interested in the ways that fiction can be used as means of resistance, as a way of questioning and subverting dominant narrative structures. I use the Girl as a way to present an alternative narrative.”

With origins in Dick and Jane children’s books, Achjadi digital works and animations illustrate how such “childhood” media tend to oversimplify a world oft besieged with war and extreme tragedy, and are both subtly and overtly used to normalize what is going on in the world.

“Being trained in printmaking, and teaching print media, I have a long-standing interest in the role of printed matter in the distribution of information, whether in overt ways such as propaganda or subtle ways such as children’s literature…There is a guise of innocence in many of these objects and images that seem to be directed to children, and it is this guise that I am interested in playing with.”

The Further Adventures of Girl will be on display from Thu May 28 - Sun July 12 at the Richmond Art Gallery in BC.