In her essay, Invisible Europe, the Croatian author DubravkaUgresic, states, “No matter what we call them – guided by the etiquette of political correctness – whether immigrants or emigres, refuges, exiles or asylum-seekers, we all know about whom we’re talking.” In today’s world, living outside of one’s place of origin has become an undeniable identity. This is a fact, usually, difficult to deal with, both by the displaced and by those at the adopted surroundings. Migrants or refugees are treated by their hosts as special species. In many cases the person who arrives at a different country turns into a snail, carrying the abandoned homeland on his/ her back (of mind).

Segments of lost location are gathered in stories, anecdotes, testimonies, letters, songs, trinkets, family albums, clothes and several other ‘not-needed-anymore’ items by those who, like Ruby Chishti, live away from their place of birth, an artist of Pakistani origin residing in the USA since 2002. In her latest solo exhibition, What Fragment of You Survives in Me? at Canvas Gallery Karachi (March15-24), pieces of fabric, noticeably from ladies’ garments, were used for creating works, which pointed to a life spent or witnessed. Her work becomes a magic that brings back past to the present, and diminishes distances with the help of torn, cut and leftover parts of tapestry, collected and combined and constructed by the artist at her studio in New York City.

While in Lahore, she had gathered objects of nature or industrial products to fabricate her sculptures. Crows made of black trash bags, straws and threads forI Dreamt of a Space, at the First Vasl International Artists’ Workshop, Gadani, 2000; or cows sculpted with fabric and straw, Giving End, 2001, in Threads, Dreams, Desires at Harris Museum, Preston, UK. She also put a large installation, Sketch of a Fading Memory, at Moving Image, the inaugural show of National Art Gallery in 2007, using wood and textile material.

This quality of never letting go, of a page of private note, a leaf picked on a stroll, a cutting left after stitching a dress, is like preserving the memory of a house lived, a street frequented, a neighbourhood visited. It’s a collector’s chore; a gatherer’s task. (Ijaz ul Hassan in his lecture on Shakir Ali, described artists as thieves, who pick whatever they find and horde it for use in future – artworks). It is the practice of never dumping what was once valuable in the dustbin of practicality, especially if you are surviving outside of your homeland. You walk on the Fifth Avenue or 26^th Street in NYC, yet resurrect a small alley in old Lahore.

When an artist reverts to a congested, depilated, dysfunctional town known for its history, preferring it to a glamorous, grandiose, prosperous metropolis of the first world, there must be more than one reason for the aesthetic choice.

The foremost is a longing for one’s home, family, language. Perhaps living away, one becomes more aware of the significance of one’s‘alien’ name too. It’s an identity. The name denotes region, origin, religion and gender. In some instances, age too (names like Farah and Saddam were fashionable in a certain era). As our names remind of our past (and our parentswho selected them), our art also refers to our roots, personal, shared, social and of gender.

Ruby Chishti’s work is a means to recreate that past, primarily for the maker. She has transposed fragments of disjointed houses from New York to Karachi, yet the actual address of the sender and the recipient is in Lahore. Or maybe not Lahore, but just a neighbourhood to which she is attached.

Chishti’s work can be viewed from another perspective, too. She fabricates facades of dwellings, fragments with suggestions of windows, ladders and ornamental openings. These structures are torn, uneven, stitched through several folded fabrics, along with strands, stripes and threads falling down or hanging in different directions. If one, for a moment, removes the identity of certain elements, like jharokas that connect her sculptures to the historic architecture of Lahore, Chishti’s houses could be from anywhere, from ruined Afghanistan, war-torn Syria, tormented Palestine, ravished Ukraine or some other unfortunate place on the globe.

These works also indicate an internal rupture. The artist shares that “for the past fifteen years” she has been “exploring the everlasting relationship between architecture and the human body” that has led her to focus “on the intersection of patriarchy and exclusion”. The fact that her buildings are assembled primarily with shreds of fabric and threads, converts the house into a feminine entity. Particularly since she has been “exploring complex ideas about humanity, gender disparities and migration centring on women’s relationship to architecture”.

Gender consciousness and concern for women’s lives and experiences probably is the thread that connects Ruby Chishti’s work (and not only in the recent exhibition, but also earlier depictions of doll-like women and figurines in colourful burqas). She might also have picked a cow or a buffalo to shine a critical spotlight on a South Asian description of womanhood. If a group of cows made of fabric and straw, sitting and leaning against the wall of Harris Museum were meant to provoke one to imagine a group of women relaxing and chatting at the end of a good day, Anonymous Biographies IV, a sculpture of a bull’s head, using the animal’s horns along with leather corsets, bra, underclothing, scrapes of fabric, thong, polyester, gold leaf and thread likely draws on the same reference. besides echoing Pablo Picasso’sBull’s Head (composed of a seat and handlebars of a bicycle).

The cultural association is further probed in her All Her Calves were Slaughtered, where a woman is sitting close to a crouching buffalo. In the South Asian context, a buffalo and a cow are not too different; both are kept for producing milk and regarded as providers of food and energy.

Among South Asian Hindus, cows are deferentially referred to as gau mata (cow mother). Then there is the notion of Bharat Mata (motherland). The popular comparison between mother and land, or woman and location, has also been brought into spotlight in Ruby Chishti’s work.

The women in Ruby Chishti’s art, and our times, are displaced mothers, adolescents, girl children – wandering from one place to another and crossing borders. They are called “immigrants or emigres, refugees, exiles or asylum-seekers.” They are taking their homes, histories, cultures, languages and customs as moveable property.

The writer is an art critic