‘Home’ has been a subject of my artistic inquiries for at least the last five years. I extrapolate it to the idea of ‘homeland’ in my PhD research project. My concerns as an artist are primarily about erasing the lines drawn between people by bringing about dialogues within the context of works I make. I am primarily interested in using various materials in order to conceptually and critically address the idea of home and homeland through art.
The paintings titled war in the last waterbody and Enola gay are few among the initial works that triggered my larger inquires through art practice. As part of this inquiry, a series of works were made using the visual language of maps. In this series I predominantly used the human body as a repository and carrier for maps. Each work presents aspects of cartography that have been complicit in systematic violence and the failure of human intelligence. This series of works weaves cartography, homeland and human body together. Drawing upon Judith Butler’s notion of human body as a set of relations and interrelations, I sought to approach the art as a set of relations rather than an object for contemplation.In my map series, the human body becomes a charged presence as it continuously reinterprets itself through the politically and ontologically loaded conceptual and spatial categories of the home and the home land.