For Maya Arulpragasam this gulf between image and reality in the visual world of the West could not be more poignant. Now a St Martin’s trained artist who has also formed a new band with Justine Frishman (ex-Elastica), writer of the introduction of this book. Maya arrived in London in 1985 at the age of ten, as a war refugee from the Tamil struggle for freedom in Sri Lanka in which her family was closely involved. At that time she only spoke two words in English that were perhaps prophetic of the clash of cultures she was destined to navigate, “Michael” and “Jackson”.

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M.I.A

Images and icons of revolution and resistance litter our visual environment. Torn from their original context they are put to work for their own ends by agents of our culture industry. Images of Ché are used to promote a beer brand, the iconography of the Soviet Union is regularly plundered to reference revolutionary chic and symbols that recall the Black Panthers are rebranded in order to assist the sales of hip-hop albums. These are all examples of images that are only half-alive. They are used to weakly reference the notion of revolution and resistance when once they were actually the visual representation of those ideas. The visual languages of both worlds, the distant one of armed struggle in Sri Lanka and the comfortable world of the West, end up blended in her work. Her stencilled images of figures from the Tamil freedom movement, tigers and images of the female leader of the Tamil are graffited onto walls and wooden boards and captured here in M.I.A. With their propaganda-like simplicity the images stay true to their subject matter and yet so jaundiced is the visual appropriate and twist anything, trust is the first casualty.

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