Artists Index: Seema Mattu

Seema Mattu (b. 1993, Birmingham, lives and works between Birmingham and London) is a Valmiki world-building trickster whose multi-channel practice is framed as a theme park - known as SEEMAWORLD. A playful rollercoaster of intersecting amenities, visitors are prompted to portal around a fantastical framework interlaced by the complexities of Seema’s own multi-faceted personhood. With a commitment to speculative storytelling linked to British South Asian culture and its roots in Birmingham (UK), tapestries of SEEMAWORLD are woven by CGI (computer-generated imagery) and IRL (in real life) environment-building, 3D character creation, mixed-media animation, folk-punk sound design and visual spectacle to traverse and subvert sentiments around: systems of caste, queer desire, fan labour and gender biases within digital landscapes. “SEEMAWORLD is underpinned by organic forms of song and dance, where I also reflect on my role of performer and puppeteer in it all. The interlocking layers of my personhood harbour a lived experience of inaccessibility, untouchability and impurity. This is often what empowers me to subvert heteronormative, misogynistic and casteist imbalances in the subject matter I tackle. I’m particularly interested in genres of cyberpunk and solarpunk, and their fusion with both South Asian folk culture and a diasporic British Valmiki existence. SEEMAWORLD itself is a self-generating archive. The biotic evolution of performance, movement, imagery and sound design goes beyond how a utopian South Asian existence might look - but rather how it might feel.”