Contemporary Notions of Home

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Text: Salwat Ali
Visuals: VM Gallery

Who we are is determined by where we come from and how we define ourselves.
A new type of person whose orientation and view of the world profoundly transcends his or her indigenous culture is developing from the complex of social, political, economic, and educational interactions of our time.


“Nation, culture, and society exert tremendous influence on each of our lives, structuring our values, engineering our view of the world, and patterning our responses to experience. Human beings cannot hold themselves apart from some form of cultural influence. No one is culture free. Yet, the conditions of contemporary history are such that we may now be on the threshold of a new kind of person, a person who is socially and psychologically a product of the interweaving of cultures in the twentieth century.”

-Peter Adler
Centered on the multi-visions of multiculturalism a recent VM exhibition, Homelands- A 20th Century Story of Home, Away and All the Places In Between, curated by Latika Gupta attempts to project this continuously evolving definition of ‘home.’ Comprising art productions selected from the British Council Contemporary Art collection Homelands is a concentration of British artists but their focus is not confined just to Britain because as Andrea Rose, Dir Visual Arts points out, “Britishness” itself is now an increasingly fluid concept, with the capital city, London, home to 300 different nationalities. The artworks in the exhibition explore a range of meanings associated with the word “homeland”: migration, exile, displacement, the search for belonging, and the life of a minority community. Through these themes, Homelands expands its scope to show how identities are no longer defined in terms of nationality, but also through language, religion, ethnicity and custom.