GHAR KAHA HAI? (WHERE IS HOME?)
JANUARY 9 – FEBRUARY 2, 2024
Anushray Singh
Time-Based Media Art and Photo Exhibit
Third Space: Places, Spaces and Idea of ‘Home’ is a seminal work building on the MFA Thesis show Ghar Kaha Hai? (Where is Home?) (2020). The exhibit expresses Anushray Singh’s continuous exploration of the concept of ‘Third Space’ through the perspective of immigration, identity, nostalgia, longing, abandonment, memory, and homeliness.
Through photographs and time-based media, audiences are immersed in the complex and nuanced identity involved in the homemaking of immigration. Singh’s previous research on film, media, and South Asia expands on Oriental, Occident, East, and West and an understanding of the First and Third Worlds. The idea and central thesis are to make ‘one’ experience the ‘in-between’ space between East and West, First and Third, Orient and Occident. This is the space of identity/place/homemaking, a universal and niche immigration experience.
Anushray, as the perspective of this ‘in-betweenness’ and making ‘third space’ in authentic experience, juxtaposes, imagines, and brings together India, Canada, South Asia, North America, East and West. As an academic researcher, filmmaker, media artist, writer, and educator, Singh aims to create an inclusive space for the South Asian diaspora. Third Space is explored as a representation of emotionally solid and in-between feelings often felt by South Asian students, workers, and citizens in Canada and the West. The sincere goal is to meaningfully add to the conversation of inclusivity and diversity and acknowledge the assimilation of non-Western identity into the larger cultural canon of contemporary Canadian society. Singh’s role as an artist is to give that perspective to both people of the diaspora and others outside of it. It is to experience a state of ‘in-betweenness’ that many immigrants carry within, unspoken and unheard.