The Good Time

The Good Time is an immersive, multi-channel sound installation that explores life as part of the South Asian Diaspora using dialogue from five first-generation Indian American siblings. Their responses to a set of interview questions build the foundation for a constructed narrative of their collective experience through highlighting the points of resonance within their individual experiences. The overlapping fragments of dialogue are set to an original, through-composed musical score, reflective of the narrator’s response to the emotional landscape.

Completed in December 2019, this project began as a way to investigate the intersection between first and second generation experiences, with the goal of building a bridge between the two. What emerged was a portrait of a family — told in fragments — which existed not just as a cultural exploration and a sonic work, but as a comforting balm and vehicle of expression for the curious mind of a young adult trying to construct their identity and find their place in the world.

When the exhibition of the work was put indefinitely on hold during the early pandemic, the time that followed shifted the lens through which the piece was understood. It has become evident that there is a missing piece that would make the work more enduring — my own voice as the second generation and as the narrator whose story is birthed from what came before and bridges the two histories.

For now, the project remains on hold, but it is my great hope that I will be able to create a re-vamped version of The Good Time, now eight years later, to take it beyond the realm of my early work in identity formation and give it the nuance it deserves as a proper auto-ethnographic and artistic work.