How does the experience of exile complicate relationships to place and home?
Is home for you a place, or a feeling?
Introduction
When you think of home, what comes to mind? Do you envision one place in particular, or do many different places feel like home? Is home for you a place, or a feeling? Where do you feel a sense of belonging?
The three artists featured here—Zarina, Siah Armajani, and Ai Weiwei—all explore the theme of exile through their work. Involuntary exile is the state of being banished from one’s country, particularly by authoritarian governments that limit principles of democracy and freedom of expression. In the case of self-imposed exile, people flee their home nations as a response to tumultuous political events, persecution, war, and genocide and find refuge in new countries. Either way, people who experience exile suffer psychological, emotional, and physical hardships, including separation from family and homeland and adjustment to a new place.
Zarina
The concept of home, whether geographic, spiritual, or ancestral—resonates throughout Zarina Hashmi’s (known professionally by her first name) work and particularly in these prints, Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines. Each etching represents a plan of the different homes she has inhabited since leaving Aligarh, her birth city in India, and traces her life through early adulthood in the cities of Bangkok, New Delhi, Paris, Bonn, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz (California), and New York, where she finally settled in the 1970's. Paper-especially handmade paper-was a crucial artistic medium throughout Zarina's career. While we may not be able to physically enter the rooms Zarina represents in her etchings, we can engage with the sense of space she evokes through her memories and our imagination.
Zarina's art practice includes drawings, printmaking, and sculpture that explore themes of house and home, displacement, and feelings of exile. At a young age, she experienced the damaging effects of the fallout of the Partition of India in 1947, which divided colonial India under British rule into two independent states of India and Pakistan along ethnic and religious lines. She and her family were among the several million Muslims displaced to Pakistan. Even though she lived in New York City for the last four decades of her life, she considered herself to be a perpetual exile and said "I do not feel at home anywhere, but the idea of home follows me wherever I go." Zarina's artworks provide opportunities for people around the world to connect with their own stories of the homes they have made, in places old and new.
Siah Armajani
This installation was made by Siah Armajani, an Iranian American, Minneapolis-based artist, architect, and political activist. Visually it refers to a sculpture made by Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti titled The Palace at 4 a.m. Armajani’s construction is a glass room bordered by black wooden beams, with three handless closed doors. Inside the glass room is a cage of closely spaced vertical green bars containing a simple wooden chair and a bed with a mattress and pillow. It features two life-size, faceless dummies, the observer and the observed. One figure wears a dark suit and has what looks like a golden halo around his head and is seated on a balcony overlooking the glass room, while the other figure is slumped over, asleep at a plain desk inside the glass room.
Photo: Larry Risser.
The title of the work tells us this figure is dreaming of Saint Adorno—the haloed figure on the balcony—a reference to German philosopher and cultural critic Theodor W. Adorno, for whom exile (from the Nazi regime) was an ethical choice.
Throughout his career, Armajani has created works that explore the physical, political, and emotional condition of exile. Armajani acknowledges that on one level this sculpture represents himself, an exile from his native Iran since 1960. For him, exile is being simultaneously on the outside and on the inside of a culture, unable to fully participate even though one can see what is happening. Although viewers are unable to physically enter the highly personal space of this sculpture, they have full visual access on all sides. We can see that the doors that appear unlocked on the outside are padlocked inside. The sculpture invites contemplation and discussion but defies simple explanation, perhaps suggesting there is nothing simple about exile.
Ai Weiwei
Artist-activist Ai Weiwei was born in Beijing, the capital of the People’s Republic of China, which was founded by Mao Zedong as a communist state in 1949. His father, Ai Qing, was an acclaimed poet and literary figure of the 20th century who was caught up in the government’s purge of intellectuals during its anti-Rightist campaign (1957-59) and labeled "antirevolutionary". Ai's entire family was exiled to a labor camp in a remote village in Xinjiang in northwest China. After the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, the family was sent even farther north to a camp on the edge of the Gobi Desert. Ai Qing was forbidden to read and write and was forced to scrub toilets at the camp every day. The family was sent back to Xinjiang when Ai Weiwei was fourteen years old, and they were allowed to return to Beijing five years later.
Jindřich Nosek (NoJin) / CC BY-SA.
Ai's Marble Chair, featured in Mia's collection, is based on a traditional yokeback chair, which was one of the few objects that his family was allowed to keep when they were sent into exile. Ai Weiwei's experience of exile continues into his adult life. He has been a longtime critic and dissident, speaking out against the Chinese government on a range of humanitarian issues. When asked what home means to him, Ai states, "It's a place where there's more tolerance and where you are accepted as a whole and not rejected, If your home is against you, it is no longer your home. In my home country, I've never been accepted/ They put me into prison, beat me, and exiled me." Ai Weiwei's personal experience of leaving his homeland has continued to find a place in his art, especially his work to raise awareness about the global refugee crisis, which he refers to as a human crisis.
Teaching and Learning Strategies
Engage your students in a discussion about what home means to them. Where is home? Is home a place, or a feeling? Is home tied to certain people in their lives? Have they ever needed to leave their home? What might it feel like to flee from your home because of violent conflict and persecution, or if the government forced you to leave? What would it be like to have to adapt to a new environment and different way of life? Share different examples of this happening throughout history and around the world.
Many people including artists and intellectuals have been forced into political exile around the world and throughout history. Students can conduct research focusing on artists from different time periods and places. Have students reflect on how the different artists express their experiences through their art.
- What was taking place in the artist’s homeland that forced them to flee?
- Where did the artist go?
- What was the artist’s experience moving to a new place?
- How does the artist’s artwork explore the themes of home, displacement, and exile?
- Was the artist ever allowed to return home? If so, did the artist move back, or continue to live abroad?
While the stories presented here are also part of American history. Indigenous communities in the eastern United States were forcibly removed from their homelands starting in 1830, and Japanese Americans experienced forced internment in concentration camps during World War II (1942–46). Some resources include this curriculum from PBS Learning Media “Standing Bear’s Footsteps | Meaning of Home,” the Minnesota Historical Society’s page on “The US-Dakota War of 1862,” and the “Web Resources and Lessons” provided by the Japanese American National Museum.