Tessa Norton

Dark Circles (2022) is a work about the deep weirdness of being Anglo-Indian. In its original iteration at FACT Liverpool it was in a haunted waiting room, with archive video, ephemera and text works. You can see installation views below. I’ve now made a single-channel version of the video, and a digital publication of the text. You can watch it here:

Anglo-Indian identity was an uncomfortable by-product of the British Empire, linked forever to the railways and the industrial revolution’s engines of progress, but also to dancing, movement, and institutionalised gaslighting. The Anglo-Indians were simultaneously privileged within the Empire and othered and marginalised by the British establishment. Dark Circles looks through the doe-eyes of Helen, Merle Oberon and Cuckoo Moray, three performers of Anglo-Indian heritage, who were able to use their perceived glamour and shape-shifting sexuality to negotiate a path to visibility, both compromised and bolstered through their ambiguous heritage. It was a weird old time, alright.

Credits:

Dark Circles was developed on the Jerwood Arts x FACT Digital Fellowship which I received in 2020-2021, and was first shown in Let The Song Hold Us at FACT Liverpool in 2022.

With enormous thanks, as ever, to Jerwood, and to the dream team at FACT Liverpool, especially Charlotte Horn, Maitreyi Maheshwari, Mark Murphy, Lesley Taker.

The voiceover and soundtrack was produced by the excellent Augustin Bousfield.

Selected press:

Radio 4, Front Row: “Dark Circles was a standout…it was the poetry that held me, just beautiful poetry.”

The Guardian: **** “Norton’s conversational tone is soothing, but the content is probing.”

Corridor 8: “The confusion inherent in occupying this identity is made explicit in the prose poem that accompanies the film. Norton casts the Empire as an unreliable narrator, a serial gaslighter of which her sense of self is both a product and victim. Her body is both a testament to the rigidity of the imperial poles of centre/margin, east/west, and their instability—an instability that England needs hidden. Hiding this is hiding her, or part of her, and other Anglo-Indians. But as Norton says, like ‘hiding a statue by throwing a sheet over it’, the statue is still there.”

Installation views:

Tessa Norton, Dark Circles (2022). Commissioned by and developed in residency at FACT as part of the Jerwood Arts / FACT Digital Fellowship, supported by Jerwood Arts. Supported with funds from Arts Council England and Liverpool City Council.

Images by Rob Battersby.