Hiten Bawa

Visual Alphabets

These 30 artworks explore my three identities as a South African, as a deaf person and as an Indian person.
I use three different alphabets and combine them to represent my unique identity: the South African Sign Language alphabet, the hand signals used in the Johannesburg taxi industry and the dance mudra from classical Indian dance. Within these alphabets, the same common hand gesture can stand for a letter in a conversation, a destination in another setting and as a symbolic gesture in a dance performance.

Taxi hand signs and minibus taxis are uniquely South African and specific for Johannesburg due to the many segregated townships surrounding the city centre. To catch a taxi, locals use specific hand signs to indicate their destination. In artworks 1 to 17, I superimposed the taxi hand signs onto the maps of the destination at an urban scale.

Artworks 18 to 30 are collages of different hand shapes in a random arrangement as opposed to the alphabetical representation found in educational resources.

Hiten Bawa is an Artist, Architect and Accessibility Consultant based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Hiten is a profoundly deaf person with bilateral cochlear implants. He works primarily with acrylic paints, watercolours and inks to express his cultural identity and perspectives of people with disabilities.
He holds a Master of Architecture (Prof) degree from the University of Cape Town and runs his own creative practice called Studio HB. He had exhibited his work in South Africa, Japan and Spain and is currently working on a wide range of creative work from graphic novel to architectural illustrations, paintings and designing new houses.

all artworks: 21 ×30 cm

artwork 1-10: Charcoals, conte, pencils, gouache paints and archival inks on 270gsm watercolour paper.
artwork 11-17: Archival inks on 270gsm watercolour paper.
artwork 18-30: Pencils, india ink, acrylic and gouache paints on 300gsm Fabiano Artistico paper.

Hiten on Instagram