The Return Of The Repressed, 2020-2021

This series is in pursuit to inquire and converse, what constitutes home- physically and psychologically. Is it the physical four walls, the family, the familial narratives of partition, the loss of people and the language or is it the geography and its surroundings? I Have lived in four different cities in the past decade. My return to Ahmedabad after 11 years, where my family settled and found refuge post partition, pushed me to interrogate the finer nuances of home through various micro and macro perspectives. Within the similar context, it attempts to question the dynamics of our physical ‘home’s’ that we inhabit through longing and belonging. The ambit of such an action, at once, poses difficult questions and situations: of what we consume, how we get influenced and what we negate whilst our understanding of home in hybrid urban setups. Moreover, the recent ongoing crises has somehow forced us to lock ourselves within a closed structural format of differing individual ideologies and renegotiate the idea of home.

The process has unravelled itself through a reverse mechanism where the ‘self’ is examined and understood through the other. That being so, making the public or the people in a way, as co– authors of the work and aesthetic production; making the work in itself a social space.