Booth C4
https://www.artdubai.ae/
A dispersal from one’s home or homeland is a flighty gravitas for and towards a more fantastical future. A dispersal from one’s home or homeland ensues from compulsion, where struggles – however defined, of economic, social and political natures – encourage, no, compel the migrant to seek another home. In such terms fantasy is a visceral agent, bearing promises of fulfillment, security, desire and contentment even while being entrenched in parameters of the unknown and processes of experimentation. But the realities of the immigrant experience are much more complex than ratified and gratified dreams. In the worst of cases, political upheaval and the recalibration of citizenship in various world regions has caused mass dislocations leading to the current and persistent refugee crises. In the best of cases, voluntary emigration even across generations bears an unforgiving nostalgia resulting in an emblematic negotiation of other-ness, tinged with the hope of resolution that may or may not come in one lifetime.
To Give the House Another is a group presentation by three diasporic artists from or within the Indian Subcontinent – including Praneet Soi (from Kolkata to Amsterdam), Faiza Butt (from Lahore to London) and Zaam Arif (from Karachi to Houston) – whose works narrativize perspectives and dissensions around cultural integration and assimilation in the West while mediating the emotional sensibilities, structural elements and mythic conditioning of their ethnic homes and communities in the East as well, as explore ideas of displacement, family and the notion of home.
