“Milk—or our existence in proximity with milk—presupposes a lexicon of aphoristic language that applies to many social situations: to skim, to condense, to homogenize, to lactate, to express, to culture, to curdle, to separate. Across digital platforms, however, milk has rapidly soured into a symbol of white supremacy.
In her expanded practice, Eleh’s experimental work blends philosophical ideas, parody, and allegory to highlight the boundary between gender, national, and ethnic identity. With humour and great conceptual vigour, she employs an array of materials, new media, visual cues, and storytelling techniques to prompt reflection on our virtual spaces and asymmetries of power.
Spoiled Milk expands upon this practice as the artist investigates broad themes of alienation, migration, racial violence, microaggression, and radicalism in the digital space. The immersive installation underscores an increasing need for vigilance as we identify and address social attempts to co-opt symbols and everyday language for extremist purposes. Viewers are encouraged to reflect upon historical identity markers, interrogate hierarchical relationships, and propose new resistive or emancipatory futures beyond our present landscapes. We invite you to question whether people can become spoiled in their privilege. When does privilege spoil our social interactions and cause our digital dynamics to sour? Do certain performances of identity or historically established power structures have an expiration date in the colonial project?”
-Megan Kammerer, curator, Visual Arts Centre Clarington
