The conception of home on me

Decoloniality and Cultural Discourse

Home on Me is derived from the idea that many carry home on their person. Home can be carried through a garment or accessory one wears, through a tool one regularly uses, through a word one utters, a picture one draws or any other form of self-expression. The idea of home equally varies, it could connote ancestral ties, a physical place or even a sentiment.

Home is generally thought of as comfortable. But home is complex. Home does not always make sense. Home is not singular. Home is not stagnant. Home is not always easy to discuss or express. How is home created? Who deserves to make a home in a certain place? Can one truly belong to more than one home? How does a home endure through cultural and political upheaval? Home on Me’s open submission and diverse student group allows for an exploration of these questions. To define home is impossible, but to consider its many manifestations means to interrogate the intersecting notions of belonging, bodily autonomy, diaspora and double consciousness, migration, gender, race and cultural heritage.

As our works and objects express a certain interpretation of home and its questions, visitors can reinterpret these interpretations, and refract them through the lenses of their own experiences and ideas.

The beauty of the exhibition medium is such that one can experience this process in person, in an interactive manner, in an intimate journey. Artists’ and visitors’ perceptions combine to form manifold stories. Such is our goal, such is the nature of curation, to tell and create stories. The objects and works displayed in this show are a unique combination of garments, familial objects, paintings and more.

Home is also a place where we feel a sense of belonging and comfort. It’s a place where we can be ourselves and where we create memories with our loved ones. For those who have experienced diaspora, the idea of home can be complex and layered. It can be a place that is both familiar and foreign, evoking feelings of nostalgia and loss.

The exhibition Home on Me explores the concept of home through the lens of diaspora, highlighting the ways in which people navigate the tension between their past and present homes. Through art, storytelling, and personal reflections, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on their own connections to home and what it means to belong.

Note : The exhibition unpacks decolonisation in a gentle, inclusive manner through touching on the sense of belonging, focusing on the home.

Home on Me is what students of UAL decided to do to raise their voices against the colonisation.

This exhibition started with a conversation, a discussion about home and the many similarities that Sahara and I shared through our common heritage.

Our vision was to bring together artists that felt like home was not just something tangible but something emotional, personal, sensory, something that held more significance than just the four walls it occupied.

Our intention was to create a space that was common in its comfort through these multiple perspectives. We have 23 artists from all over the world redefining the idea of home.

How much of your home is you and how much of you is your home?

Join us on the 23rd to navigate your way through these familial landscapes and concepts, and maybe you'll find yourself searching for that home in yourself.

Zehra Marikar President of The Curation Society UAL

Yaska Sahara Hirani Harji Co-founder of the Decolonsing Fashion Society

Curation and exhibition making is a form of storytelling. All the administration, organising and marketing ultimately serves this purpose. Home on Me is a result of students wanting to learn how to navigate this unique form of storytelling. This is versatile and less tangible than the written word, for example, but it is nonetheless powerful.

Curation has many forms and styles, displaying things in context or against a plain white backdrop, displaying them with an overall theme or at random, displaying them with or without label. No matter the style, it is impossible to deny that this dynamic medium has long been one of society’s most privileged. Though the university too is sphere of privilege, we can put our best efforts into sharing diverse narratives, and welcoming all visitors, telling stories that have been historically less explored, those of women, people of colour, and those from more humble beginnings.

For the Decolonising Fashion Society, we wanted to explore fashion curation and express our core value through doing so. That is, using fashion as a vehicle of empowerment for minds of various backgrounds, as a tool to navigate larger issues and to bring students together in a safe space to express themselves.

The pursuit of decoloniality is the pursuit of inclusion and equity. The extent to which institutions controlled by rich, largely white, people control the space and means to create exhibitions is not only sad, but wasteful. So many stories go untold. That which one may consider mundane could be a key cultural object to another.

In turn, the Curation Society was eager to take on the challenge, to experiment, trying something new, multiple mediums, different themes and tackling ambitious goals. Most importantly, for both societies, it was about taking advantage of the platforms and resources available to us, about seizing the opportunity to create a project where we could make the choices and have our voices heard.

Alice Ji-Won Kim

Introduction

Home and identity are interconnected. When the home is displaced, one’s identity is in danger. Identity remains an acute issue for artists raised in one culture who now live and work elsewhere. For artists who operate regularly on an international stage, especially if they live and work in more than one location, the collapsing boundaries of local and national communities make establishing a coherent identity more complicated. Even artists who remain rooted in one place are shaped by interchange with people, ideas, images, and products from elsewhere. (Robertson & McDaniel, 2012, p.58).

Sculptor Do Ho Suh’s installations are representative examples of how themes of identity and place intersect. Born in Korea, Suh studied art in Korea and the United States, and works across New York and Seoul. He explores the concept of space, time, and home across the borders using various media. To an extent, the displacement that Suh experiences every time he changes locations hinders a stable sense of identity. Hence, this essay explores the meaning of home through the lenses of globalism and negotiating canon.

Globalism and the appearence of new nomads

People have begun to imagine themselves as a global community through trade andinformation networks. In a crisis of industrialisation altering the world’s climate, people are just beginning to grasp the connection between a flood of cars on a California freeway and the literal floods crashing through homes in Bangladesh (Christensen, 2008). Hence, people realise the importance of home and space. However, displacement in the retrospective is not limited to climate refugees. People are often displaced due to forced migration, modern slavery, and economic and war refugees.

Displacement also applies to many people living in the era of globalism. People keep moving around the houses, transferring and trying to adapt to completely different geological locations and cultures with developed transportation. Hybridity, a blending or fusion of cultural influences, is endemic to being an American. Nearly every United States resident has ancestors who were voluntary or involuntary immigrants (Malik & Gavin, 1998). To modern people, life is perhaps not just a bunch of consecutive spaces (homes) but constant displacement. These people can be considered New Nomads.

Do Ho Suh’s Almost Home (Suh, 2018) is his personal history of migration that has led to the desire to capture his past and forge a connection between the places he has left and the life he leads today (Showalter, 2018). Suh said, “These are architectural pieces that are not designated with any particular function. They are in-between spaces, like from the bedroom to the kitchen—You can call it a corridor maybe, but a Hub looks like a room.” Ranging in colour from red and pink (New York) to green (Berlin) to blue (Seoul), the fragile sheets in this organza-like passageway resemble transparent, life-size walls. (King, 2018) Suh’s sculptures have no hard walls. He makes sculptures out of a translucent material typically used in Korean summer wear. This flexible material can be folded and unfolded whenever necessary.

In a sense, Suh’s artwork is like a suitcase. So lightweight and portable, they can be carried and installed worldwide and transformed depending on the place and space. This characteristic perfectly fits New Nomads who constantly move around and take on their lives.

New nomads negotiating canon

New Nomads face an identity crisis because of Globalism. Home is always tightly connected to one’s identity. Due to this continuous displacement of home, identity is influenced, and it is tough to have a stable personal representation. Walter Anderson explores identity shifts: “a post-modern person is a multi-community person, and his or her life as a social being is based on adjusting to shifting contexts and being true to divergent— and occasionally conflicting— commitments” (1995, p.128). Post-modern people are part of the multi-community, making it difficult to express themselves through communal identity due to their intersectional experiences. Identity can be considered fluid, depending on the situation a person is put into, based on which it can be transformed or abandoned. According to a contemporary theorist, a person can be considered as “performing” (Robertson & McDanie, 2012, p.54) based on the version of their identity they choose to show in different contexts.

“Awareness of diversity contrasts strongly with essentialism” (Robertson & McDaniel, 2012, p.46). In today’s world, people seek variance more than parallelism. These groups tend to be smaller based on individuals who may identify with different groups in multiple situations. Moreover, if interested in diversity, one can recognise internal differences within their community. This helps one recognise their sole traits, which guides them to a path where they can fight against the existing canons about groups of distinct individuals and establish their own identity, which is why, when western writers talk about identity, they refer to it as ones shif-ting identity along with their social and cultural presences (Robertson & McDaniel, 2012).

Hybridity is “a state of being, arrived at through the innovative mixing and borrowing of ideas, languages, and modes of practice” (Robertson & McDaniel, 2012, p.48).

It is the blending and synthesis of different cultures that come together voluntarily or as is the outcome of forced migration. A good example of forced hybridity is the imposition of one culture on another during colonisation. Such communities are often subjected to facing several western canons or stereotypes set by the western society to establish their own identity. Each individual represents their community and has to cross these obstacles to prove their distinctiveness.

Do Ho Suh’s exhibition always presented the rare opportunity of phy-sically seeing the homes of New York, Seoul, and Berlin (Leeum, 2012). In his work Fallen Star ⅕ (Suh, 2008 & 2011), Suh exhibiteda clash of spaces he had been through, where he constructed a collision of a traditional Korean house (Hanok) and a 19th-century American mansion at a one-fifth scale. These two buildings were smashed together and then split in half, where he filled the ground floor with debris. (Muchnic, 2009) This artwork demonstrated the battle between opposing cultures that the New Nomads try to survive to fit in this alien life created with set boundaries and stereotypes. The artist’s work showcases the difference between the social structure and culture while comparing the eastern and western architectural styles, highlighting the gap between them.

Living in New England, Suh intuitively perceived the vast differences between the 18th-century western-style architecture he found himself in and Hanok he had grown up in. In Hanok, a comparatively higher percentage of the surface is taken up by windows and doors than walls. These windows and doors covered with rice paper let light inside and help one hear, feel, and see changes in nature from inside the house, thus blurring the border between inside and outside. On the contrary, the western-style house built with thick walls creates an architectural situation in which the interior and the exterior are separated, and living with nature is hardly possible. (Leeum, 2012) By portraying the clash of the western, modern apartment and eastern, natural house, Suh successfully challenges the western canon based on his experience and identity.

Searching for home

What details make a “home”? Is home based on people, places, or objects? Or is it a feeling of belonging somewhere? Perhaps it can be considered a combination of them all. In Suh's textile installations, he created replicas of his previous houses. To understand and highlight the meaning of “home”, he covered every inch of the interior with paper, rubbed it with blue charcoal, and created the textile sculpture with precision (Art21, 2022). As a result, all the houses in Hanok were suspended in the air (Suh, 2019), and the ones in New York were on the ground (Suh, 2016).

He explained that houses floating in the air represent memories, and maybe as time passes, all the houses will become a memory of once being home for him. This establishes that home is not just a building made of walls but the memories, feelings and experiences one carries, which make a place home. So even if the building fades, the memory remains intact. This idea of home is where one feels one belongs, hel-ping to stabilise the identity of an immigrant in a foreign space. It becomes much easier for people to find and accept theselves when they feel they belong. This artwork installs one’s “personal space” (home) in a “public space” (exhibition) and allow strangers in. In a way, this installation reminds the audience of the identity crisis New Nomads are going through due to displacements.

Conclusion

Suh constantly presented the construction of a building for a specific location, as well as the work of moving the personal memories permeated in the building to another space. It was an expression of one’s life, but it also revealed the identity of modern people who were nomadic and globalised. Moreover, it further suggested the direction in which people should move forward: collecting the memories and carrying them wherever they go. Searching for the meaning of home is not just finding a place to stay. It gives answers to the questions: “How will an individual try to find and stabilise their identity in this modern society?”, “Where do they belong in this constantly changing globalised era?”

To conclude this essay with Do Ho Suh’s interview, he said, “The common misunderstanding is that my work is a confrontation, a clash of cultures. It’s not really about that. It’s more about interdependency and the way things coexist. That’s what I’m interested in: how to survive and blend in. It’s an ongoing process.” (Muchnic, 2009)

This essay whose formed the basis of the exhibition, was written by Alice Kim.

Inspired from the wooden beams of a childhood attic, this deconstructed carcass seeks to explore the remnants of childhood and questions the relationship between youth and belonging through space.

Right ‘Fond of you’

2023 Wood and Organza Sculpture

Artemis van Dorssen

Def. of home. /noun/ A feeling of belonging to a wider picture. A sense of being protected. A prolonged history. A place that accompanies you permanently.

Right ‘Lived space’ ‘Presencia’

2023

Giclée Print on Hahnemühle Paper 30 x 45cm

‘Patakara’ is the Telugu word for a kitchen utensil used on the Indian subcontinent to grip handle-less steel vessels by their rims. Learning to use one to artificially grip and carry burning hot vessels of food feels very much like a skill passed on from mother to daughter, like an informal rite of passage. In weighing my life and my home to fly here, the stainless steel vessels didn’t make the ‘23 kg x 2 pcs’ cut, but the patakara fortuitously got left in. Its only purpose in London is to be here, showing you something puzzling and exotic from far away, and to remind me of what home looks and feels like.

Right

Donated by Pallavi Chamarty

Bought in early 2000s

Stainless Steel

@plobbi_with_an_i

I hear cooker whistles play catch with the wind chime. I hear crows, kites and mynahs sunbathing on rooftops, sucking on a slice of overripe watermelon. I hear a young couple quarrel, followed abruptly by 7 minutes of eerie silence, clouded only by the moans of pigeons. I hear the uncle from the 16th floor blow the conch every evening at 6:26, as his wife draws circles with a ball of fire. I hear my bathroom neighbour shower to Bastille (and kajra re), my bedroom neighbour paint to Bon Iver, and the mustard seeds bop to Beyonce in my living-room neighbour's kitchen.

Janani Venkateswaran Take a step closer and take a couple steps back. Come in closer and look a little deeper...

What do you taste? Explosions of pop rocks? Can you feel them fizzling in your mouth? Can you hear the echoes of confetti strings whisper away its dying breath? There is hardened icing on the cake and day-old jelly beans left on the dining table.

There are too many details to share, too much pain and chaos, and too much love. Look a little closer... and maybe you’ll feel it too.

Next page

‘you were my daydream, my honey-soaked tears’

2023 Acrylic, Chalk, and Ink on Canvas

102 x 152 cm

I watch my shadows become shorter, and longer, as dawns merge with dusks, merge into days, weeks, and months. I am home. Time is dancing.

Right

‘the easter eggs I never found’

2022

Acrylic, Chalk, and Ink on Canvas

61 cm. Round

Right ‘another bowl of lucky charms’

2022

61 cm. Round

Right ‘buttered pears and a sugar-filled fever dream’

2023 Acrylic, Chalk, and Ink on Canvas 61 cm. Round

This painting is a moment in time in my life, it depicts tragedy, helplessness, consolement and the feeling of being stuck and alone. This moment depicts the moment of chaos whilst my grandmother held my hands. I’m almost obsessed with the way she held me, letting me know its going to be okay when her eyes told me otherwise. I recreated this piece with the details I remember of that day. This moment is when life changing events began. The moment I opened my hands.

Envelopes created out of canvas, immersed in wax to relay ideas of communication and language among different communities.

Right ‘Lost in translation’

Zehra Marikar

@zehra_marikar

2023

Mixed Media

I often have a feeling of being in a world apart in daily life, which makes me interested in the concept of liminal space, which is like a transition between two spaces, and the common exit direction sign in architecture is like a sign of liminal space, combined with my own experience, I want to transform my inner being into a space with exit signs everywhere, many directions are even contradictory to each other and includes my graffiti and paintings, which intertwine and prolong, forming a kind of folding of space, becoming a projection of a confused consciousness due to the lack of belonging.

Home has always been a feeling, I geographically come from India a place chest deep in rich culture and heritage, which I take pride in. However I am still figuring out where my home is or what gives me the sense of belonging in a place. When I sat down to make my self portrait there were many things that ran through my mind but I wanted to showcase my personality and my identity. This made me think about the fact that I am 18 years old and I am still becoming a person and developing a personality. I still have so many paths to cross and roads to come across that will shape me. There are many pieces about my personality that still have to fit in. My jigsaw puzzle is incomplete...

Caicai is my dog, but I see her more as a family. She has been always there for me since 2019, one of the huge turning points in my life. She brings me company, joy, fun and care. She’s always the first one to sense it when I am not so happy. Our love is simple but deep, there’s no materialistic relationship between us. It’s simply that I love her, she loves me, and we have fun together. This is her fur that fell out after being brushed in 2021, when I was graduating high school, submitting a portfolio, and losing my loved ones. This pack of fur has carried so much, and it reminds me of happy moments with Caicai just seeing it being here. This pack gives me a sense of belonging.

Dan Rong

Focusing on the ideas of home, identity and belonging, this set of work will discuss the attachment between us and the earth, the connections we embrace with our journey with the land. Using the materials gathered at my homeland,this work begins to explore the link I have with London, where I live, and Hertfordshire, my birthplace.