At The Wick this week we continue to shine a light on our favourite artists of South Asian hertiage as part of the celebrations for South Asian Heritage Month. Bindi Vora is a British artist and curator based in London. Her acclaimed work Mountain of Salt was published first as a book by Perimeter Editions in 2021, and more recently was presented as part of Peckham 24, with Vora’s work Unraveling, dealing with aspects of the artist’s Kenyan-Indian heritage.

The text-based collage works that make up the staggering collection that is Mountain of Salt were a way for Vora to begin to get to grips with an overwhelming mass of information – the thick and fast slew of news that comes at us from every angle – in order to make some sort of sense of the pandemic and post-Brexit era. “I, like many others, became acutely aware of the landscape in which we were living in, where everything felt amplified,” says Vora. “Clinging to the news for updates, statistics and curves … for me it highlighted the way words and speech have a physical presence, bearing upon us and carrying weight.”

Visual material, cribbed from personal and collective archives and found imagery, and text, taken from social media and news, press conferences and protest placards, rub against each other in almost 400 pieces, drawing connections between the personal and the political, carving out the possibilites in language and their power to prompt a sea-change. Ultimately, Mountain of Salt becomes a celebration, too – of resistance and resilience in the everyday, if you know where to look for it. Sometimes the simplest statements make the biggest impact: ‘I will try to do better’, one work boldly decries.

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