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

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.

Stitching Borders: Questioning the life of New Nomads and searching for the meaning of home through Do Ho Suh’s architectural installations.

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.