Decolonising art therapy

For so long, many outside the dominant culture have learned to internalise and champion even the crudest values and assumptions of white supremacy and Western imperialism, as though they are innately true. Under this colonial project, LGBTQIA+ POC have been materially, intellectually, and spiritually occupied. Even within ‘healing’ spaces such as art therapy, we are colonised on structural, institutional, and relational levels. So much so, that we are often not fully aware of internalisations as they begin to manifest.

My experience as a brown, queer art therapy trainee (now AThR) is the context in which I explored how internalised racism/heteronormativity not only impacts how I recognise, understand and locate myself, but also with how I recognise, understand and locate my communities. This internalisation exposes itself as a symptom of systemic racial/queer trauma, that continues to operate within institutions that often fail to recognise their complicity.

Decolonising self, Decolonising self-care

Over the years of being an art therapy trainee, I reflected on how pedagogy and training would often underscore the overt, violent nature of racism, with little interrogation of the more covert nature of white supremacy. Furtiveness that was often circulated through coded language. Whenever I would speak up and name incongruences and power hierarchies, I would hear fellow white students and teachers says to me:

“I’m colour blind”

“What about my trauma?”

“PC culture is getting out of hand”

“Use strengths-based language”

“I don’t see race”

“Saying white is racist”

“All people matter”

“Not all white people have white privilege, some are more disadvantaged than you”

“I was othered being Italian and moved on”

“Here we go again”

“I feel like you’re being aggressive”

“I’m from a different generation where we didn’t make excuses”

'Kirthana' - oil on canvas by Kirthana Selvaraj, 2020

Noticing my own personal internalisations, specific to my South Asian Culture and queer identity, navigating this field as a trainee, activist, ‘consumer’ and now AThR, I found myself yearning for white allyship, which often fell flat. The importance of decolonising vulnerability and self-care became critical here. I did not want my body to become something to be extracted from for the education of others. I did not want to feel that my body only mattered when it aligned with the self-interest of a white person.

I began to appropriate and also interrogate the admittedly psychologised, capitalised and white concept of ‘self-care and ‘wellness’, particularly ‘Mindfulness’, acknowledging the difficult and hurtful feelings that emerged within me (See Figure 2).

While for some, sharing instead of protecting these ancient knowledges, contributes to both individual, collective and structural transformation, for others, who are located within the South/Eastern Asian diaspora, and in particular for me, ‘Mindfulness’, went beyond a celebration of outlying knowledges, often being applied in art therapy by white practitioners, using Mandalas and sacred rituals in classrooms and clinical sessions without context and without acknowledging history. I would witness those from within the dominant culture, freely extracting from my culture, for ‘universal’ gain and in many cases, profiting off of it.

I chose to utilise art as a research methodology but also as a tool for healing and resistance, creating art responses (See Figure 2) to not only reveal how I responded to these encounters but to notice how I confronted this divergence in my mind and body.

It revealed feeling guilty about my joy and that prioritising myself was somehow selfish, that I must earn my ‘usefulness’, through bodily sacrifices. What emerged was working to the point of illness, overextending my emotional, physical and spiritual capacity. It was minimising the microaggressions and racism I was experiencing, surrendering to the idea that my worth was inextricably linked with my productivity. When an entire community has been dehumanised, it becomes unchallenging to then exploit and excavate from ourselves.

In reality, these harmful ideas are a part of me because of pressures to acculturate, the strain of intersecting identities and the internalising of systems of oppression (See Figure 2).

How can I make my body a sanctuary? Creating new knowledge systems through art, feeling and sensing, subverting Eurocentric constructs?

'Trapped in trauma, trapped in the white cis-heteropatriarchy' - oil on canvas, digital mediation with negative space by Kirthana Selvaraj, 2020.

I explored a decolonial practise, extracted from my South Asian culture of intuiting. This led to knowing, which then led to believing. I wanted to embrace marginalised and historically relegated modes of knowledge production. Through using the materiality in ‘non-natural’ ways, against its design, I experimented with sewing into playdough, of painting by moving the substrate around a tube of paint, so that the substrate is leading, not receiving the paint. I dipped my fingers in crushed turmeric and stained public white walls, in honour of the rich ochres of my culture and the enduring ayurvedic knowledges of healing with turmeric. I found images of myself that I took after a racist slur, I chopped them up to create new assemblages, a new citizenship.

I integrated and embodied illustrations of knowledge creation that occupied a space of meaningful realisation, forming an archival practice that honoured the collective, personal and cultural, a narrative that sat outside of white governance.

I became curious about approaching Racial trauma, through using these techniques of queering materiality and decolonising self-care, towards a radical self-care and radical self-love.

When a queer, brown person nurtures and loves themself, it is emphatically revolutionary. It subverts the power of the white cis-heteropatriarchy, which is largely dependent on the subjugated to harbour shame about who we are, to doubt the experiences in our body, to take up less space, to worship whiteness and disengage from our desires and pleasures. This is why returning to my bursting magical self as a QPOC, is a gorgeous act of defiance, opposing the toxic thoughts that were never mine.

Emerging now as a registered Art Therapist and Counsellor, I work from an anti-oppressive, intersectional feminist framework, where I acknowledge all the many intersecting experiences a person may hold. I carry this idea of queering materiality to fight against any stigma that exists within these experiences and acknowledge that often we are told what we are, instead of being seen as we are.🔥