-Thanks for coming here
-Thank you
-Please sit comfortable
-Sit here?
-Feel free, this is your home
-Thank you
-How are you? Would you like to have tea?
-Yeah for sure
The work is called Let Me Get You a Nice Cup of Tea. You can see it's a very simple piece and the project talks about the tea, opium and textile. The conversation can be very personal, the conversation can be very private, the conversation can be very political.
It's totally free, you know.
-So where do you live?
-I live in Bangladesh
-Okay cool
-I have a small garden and we have a lot of herbs as well. So here I actually made for you eleven teas, all are handmade and all actually came from my garden and there is a full recipe maybe I took from tea garden, like actual tea leaves not herbs
Tea is very related to our daily life but we don't know the history of how actually tea comes in our cup and it's very much interesting to talk with different people from all around the world.
-Then you have to choose your opium napkin
-Should I just pick one?
-Yeah
-I think I want this one, the one at the bottom
-Is this it?
-Thank you
-Big one
-I don't know much about tea because it's very much not part of my culture
-Yeah, your culture is coffee culture
-This is lovely by the way
-Thank you
-You like it?
-Very nice
-I was curious about this because I can see a lot of things that seem very interesting and I wanted to ask you a little bit about it
-Of course you can ask me any questions. The map was drawn in 1886. So that map talked about British imperialism all over the world at that time and then I chose the fabric because it had the 200 year British rule. I think we lost a lot of artisans, a lot of craft and a lot of plants
-Alright, I didn't know that
-Yeah
I think it's very important to do performance in London talking about the British colonialism history. There is also a lot of brutal history and violence, immigrant workers, tea workers. For me it's also very connected, you know, to bring here in a cup and talk about the worker at the same time.
-It was really interesting hearing you talk about the history of tea because I guess for me being from the Caribbean obviously there's such a difficult relationship with sugar over there that I think in Britain sugar and tea is such a correlated thing, they go hand in hand.
-You can see the wallpaper is also drawn by sugar and tea colour and so... On the history there is a sugar coating
-Of course always
Most of my work is research based work because I like to research on object. I think object also has the memory because someone touched it/ Maybe someone used it for a long time and an object also of course has the history. All objects are related to the daily life.
I try to make it homely environment to the people because I feel that it's also very, very difficult for people to sit in the gallery. It has to be very brave people. I learn a lot from people because so many people have the knowledge and so we share the knowledge, we share the space, we share the time, even we share the memory.
I try to make a friendship.
-Thanks for coming. Thanks for sitting with me
