Shauna Beharry is a third-generation Canadian of Indian descent whose work focuses on the loss of language and of cultural reference that happens with displacement. Seeing Is Believing was her first work in a mechanically reproducible medium. The video expresses Beharry’s frustration over her inability to express in this medium, for, paradoxically, she is using video to show the limits of vision. It begins with Beharry’s camera searching a still photograph over and over. The photograph is of Beharry, wearing the sari. Her voice on the soundtrack is describing the anger and bafflement she felt when, after her mother died, she could not recognise her in photographs. Only when she put on her mother’s sari, Beharry says, did she feel that she had “climbed into her skin.” The feel of the fabric awakens for Beharry a flood of memories that were lost in the family’s movement from India to Europe to Canada. (Laura U. Marks)
