ARTIST PRACTICE
I have always been deeply fascinated by the complexities that surround the idea of a home – the sentiments, narratives and selves that are born, the many connotations around its meanings, and of course, the intense emotion that is woven into it.
The long hours I spent engrossed in processes and practice during my Master’s programme drew me away to the extent that it widened the distance between my home and my self. This distance led to the development of an altered association with the space I called home, along with the relationships I shared with my family members. Intrigued, I began examining the physical and psychological aspects that exist in and around our understandings of a ‘home.’
Eventually, I found myself picking up on strands that traced the journey of my ‘home’ through memories and oral recollections of my family members to the event of the Partition that was responsible for multiple displacements. Stitching these strands together by delving into the histories around me, I discovered that my family shared a very similar trajectory to the other migrants living in Delhi. In the present day, my practice continues to be affected by the imminent and almost cyclical displacement that awaits us, evoked due to my father’s retirement that will force us to leave our current residence – our home for over 70 years, a space which has accumulated the experiences of three generations of my family.
The intention of my body of work is to provoke thoughts on two main questions:
ए क घर होना या होता है ? (What makes an existence of a home?)
ए क घर होने से या मतलब होता है ? (What does it mean to have a home?)
I am interested in listening to and recording the narratives that subsist within markets, alongside local residents of a space and the architecture, while also exploring the ways in which spaces – both physical and imagined – inhabit the word ‘home.’ My work maps and incorporates these archives of memory within my art practice, assisted by an anthropological method of approaching the notion of time. I seek to frame the past, positioned in the present, while continuously examining the meanings that this personal archive would elicit in the future. My practice remains keenly sensitive to themes of displacement, relocation, erasure and migration, and their very private intertwinings with personal narratives and the idea of the family.
vikrant kano 