Home-Non-Home (2023)
Paper Blinds, Moving Image work.
Pierced through with language. A blank - 5 feet tall - white paper window blind is turned into a sieve for a plurality of words and languages to reimagine their bodies we attach meaning with every dot and poke. Those spaces ‘in-between’ we forget are spaces in and of themselves and see through - are here made see-through via the language that forces a looking and a reading into. These in-between spaces like curtains and blinds leak with memories and though they seem impenetrable, they are porous.
The right-hand panel of the fanned-paper is filled with drawings of homes, buildings and cuckoo birds. All the text it holds is written in the Indian language- Hindi. It has the Hindi words for home, here x there(यहाँ x वहाँ, yaha x vaha), and homonym words that can mean two things at once –
forget x mistake(भूल x भूल, bhool x bhool), past x ghost (भूत x भूत, bhoot x bhoot). It attempts to evoke a sense of a window that’s trapped bilingual musings into its skin creating a language of space and time that is particular to the artist’s experiences.
Text pierced into the left panel of the blinds
(also used as a script for the performance Citizen-Non-Citizen) –
There is a city and a non-city. Says Arundhati Roy. There is no non-city without non-citizens. She says.
Here is a home and a non-home. Here are the non-homogenised.
There are gaps in the institutions. There are homes in the gaps.
Here there is no access to access. Here there is no belonging to a home.
This is a language of familiarity lost.
This is a familiarity to a language made to be unfamiliar.
Here there are no tongues of men and their lands.
Here there is only where you are and where you were not.
There there are some tongues shaped by men. There the tongues taste like flight or fight.
That is a cuckoo born in a crow’s nest. That cuckoo could belong to the crow.
Here the cuckoo is a cuckoo that belongs to a cuckoo. Here the cuckoo doesn’t belong to a border/line.
There is a line.
There is a pretence that there is no line.
Here the lines are only straight.
Here the line is ............... is a wall.
There the walls belong to the walled in. There the non-belongers are walled out.
Here there is only 1 / 2 a third world. Here there are 2 / 3 non-city non-citizens.
What is home?
There is only 1 / 2 a home.
Here what do you call home? There is no Homing signal found.
Where is home?
Home is where there is a non-boundary is a border is a Fence is a fence that looks like a window.
