"As soon as you see a house you say, this is where I want to stay, but scarcely have you arrived before you leave again, in order to be on your way once more" -- Ibn al-Arabi

Artists are like snails, carrying their house wherever they go. For a creative individual, the idea of home embodies personal memories as well as public interaction. In a world where the notion of home is rapidly transforming, you can be in your ancestral house in whatever corner of the world, yet you feel alien -- till you log in to your Gmail account and feel grounded once again.

The notion of home is precarious, too. When an artist like Zarina reconstructs her past through spaces which could be called home, she resurrects part of herself into images. It seems from her works at the Ishara Art Foundation’s inaugural exhibition Altered Inheritances: Home is a Foreign Place in Dubai that the artist has always lived away from home but not far. Through her art, she revisits the past that remains present because it reminds of intact memories.

At the intelligently and innovatively curated exhibition by Nada Raza (Artistic Director of Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai), the works of Zarina and Shilpa Gupta are installed in the format of a house plan. Divided in different parts of the gallery space, the artworks of these two important artists appear to be conversing with each other as well the viewers.

Home or house signifies different perspectives/positions for the two artists; yet, these converge at some point. Zarina’s images draw you to a personal history of someone who has lived in different cities of South Asia; these also suggest borders, boundaries and territories. Guarded, respected and reinforced. In the ‘Atlas of My World’, 2001, Zarina draws outlines of countries and regions which have political and personal meanings for her: USA, Europe, frontier between India and Pakistan, Bangladesh, Arabian Peninsula, Japan.

From these marks on the map, Zarina moves into the intimacy of a house, particularly a place from the North Indian region. Thus the work rekindles memories of hot summer days, enclosed courtyards, sifted lights, muted sounds, strong smells, sensations that are normally preserved within people who have spent years in old buildings.

A house could be the most pivotal partner in Zarina’s life, a person who used to live in the Indian subcontinent before settling in North America. For her, ‘Home is A Foreign Place’, an entity that can be visited physically but also transported into one’s dreams and desires -- and in de-situated condition.

In the exhibition if Zarina had ‘Directions to My Home’, 2001, (digital prints on handmade paper) from an Urdu poem of Zehra Nigah translated by Nada Raza, her other works, ‘Homes I Made’, 1984-1992, (cast aluminium) and ‘Crawling House’, 1994, (hand-cut and moulded tin), invoke the urge to have a house, no matter in what part of the world you reside; since your house will be a segment of your identity. The last two works echo her sculptures ‘House on Wheels’, 1991, shown in early 1990s at the Chawkandi Art, Karachi.

The house in Zarina’s work turns into a national enclosure in the art of Shilpa Gupta. She transforms state boundaries which divide and deport people sharing a common culture and identical ethnic roots. Like West Bengal and Bangladesh. These are regions that are similar but are part of two countries; hence attract and repel each other. In Gupta, the political dividing line becomes a crucial matter/motif since it splits communities, unnaturally, turning them alien to the other half.

Border plays an important role in one’s personal life too. Shilpa Gupta has based her work, ‘Altered Inheritance 100 (Last Name) Stories’, 2014, on the private histories of those hundred individuals who had to change their surnames after crossing a border. This phenomenon was witnessed in the Jewish exodus during the World War II, migrations of Bengalis from East Bengal to India, or from one territory to another. Gupta documents this act -- a crucial step towards sacrificing your tribe, ancestor, family, parent -- by disjointing images, because if we modify our biography, we complete something higher, prestigious and practical; but we also dissect our self.

The separation of self, in most cases, extends to rift in regions, often resulting in disputed directions. Gupta’s work shown at the 56^thVenice Biennale 2015, named ‘My East is Your West’ implied how a shift in political position alters one’s orientation on compass; something that takes place between two sides of the border between Bangladesh and India. In ‘A0-A5’, 2014, the artist created a facsimile of fence between two states, by joining hand-woven cloth from Phulia (item illegally sent from one country to the other), and in the middle a line in thread denoting scale map of the fence, that has segregated people born in one tongue. In another work (‘Untitled’ 2015), floodlights on the fence as seen from the sky are captured through holes on a paper daubed in blue.

Journey over, behind and beyond barriers continues in the art of Gupta, in ‘Unnoticed’ (2017) a series of 5 C prints with fragmented spare motor parts, stuck on the pictures of sky with clouds -- a sky that is shared by two territories on the map, clouds travel freely and frequently across borders.

Like sky and clouds, language is also not limited to one nation state. In the countries falling in the Indian subcontinent, poetry too is a binding element. Not surprising that for the two artists who deal with borders and displacement, poetry turns into an essential tool. Zarina wrote lines of Faiz and Iqbal in her prints, some titles come from Ghalib and Adrienne Rich, besides links with other poets. To Shilpa Gupta, spoken words in the form of poetry are significant because these defy the division imposed by an authority. Words once formulated in mouth (‘A Liquid, the Mouth Froze’, 2018) are akin to a written script, tangible due to ink on paper. Gupta attempts to keep poetry preserved in her work, with bottles of different dimensions and a black and white photograph, all about ‘a spoken poem in a bottle’, in which "poems of resistance, by Osip Mandelstam, Malay Roy Choudhry, Wole Soyinka, Mushfiq and others have been collected, spoken and sealed into bottles".

The work also reminds of stories of leaving message in a bottle on the sea to coming generations. Art too is like these tiny glass bottles which contain messages for contemporaries, for future, but also for those who lived centuries ago. Everything is housed within us, evoking Plato’s question: ‘In the beginning was the house or the idea of house?’ One believes that "In the beginning was the Word" and the Word was the house, where we still are, without the fear of being driven out or locked in!

(The exhibition is on from March 18 to July 13, 2019)