Group Exhibition of 8 international artists from India, Syria, Iran, Vietnam, Brazil, Turkey and Columbia
Curated by Varga Tunde and Koller Margit.
Venue: Aula, MKE, Budapest, Hungary
Title: IN-BETWEEN
Genre: Installation, Three-channel video
Duration/ Size: Variable size, variable length
Why do we feel that we belong in some places and not in others? Place and identity are inextricably bound to one another. The two are co-produced as people come to identify with where they live, shape it, however modestly, and are in turn shaped by their environments, creating distinctive environmental autobiographies, the narratives we hold from the memories of those spaces and places that shaped us.
In my work “IN-BETWEEN”, I have worked with the Indian Community here especially with the women who had have somewhat different life back in India than here. How they had adjusted with the changes and balanced their life with this parallel yet altered world, how the place influences them and what basic differences they face – the acceptances and hardships that they go through; how they compare these two parallel lives…? All these are addressed in my video installation. The cartons/packing boxes symbolically reflect these shifting identities with the shifting places. I aim to portray these boxes also like windows that enable the viewers to discover the stories and elements portraying this incessant try to cope up and balance the two parallel lives within which we are oscillating ourselves. There are some empty boxes that represent the void and emptiness that unprecedentedly somewhere exist deep within all these inhabitants. I argue that there is a distinction between settling in a place and within its community and that as people adjust to life in settlements, they learn to manage their shifting places and shifting identities strategically. This struggle of existing and adjusting ‘in-between’ these two parallel spaces is reflected in my video installation.
Detailed interior view of some of the boxes
