Motherhood is a psychic and emotional landscape that makes room for everything from the banal to the sublime. It is complicated to articulate the work of motherhood. We ask mothers “Are you working?” implying that staying at home is not work. So much happens in our home space – how does one render this? This was the impetus for Being Home. Farheen Haq has felt the exhaustion, the enclosure, the safety, the uplifting love, the erasure of self, the monotony, the comfort and possibility of transcendence all within the space of her home.
Being Home explored the psychic, spiritual and emotional territories within domestic spaces. They used the dinner table, household linens and the teacup as metaphors for the many thresholds that mothers cross in their daily lives. Wrapping themselves in fabric spoke to the struggle many mothers have with rendering visible the private work that occupies so much of their time.
Haq asked herself:
What is my bodies’ relationship to this site?
How has being home constituted a spiritual/creative practice for me?
How does home live in my body?
How am I home?
How do I render visible the psychic experience of my home space?
Drawing on a history of feminist art practice that claims and makes space, Haq record herself in relation to the kitchen table and domestic objects, to create a vocabulary of gestures with which to negotiate the overlapping identities of motherhood, feminism, gender and ethnicity. Acknowledging the body as the site of direct experience, she positioned her own body as a home space and sought to understand how she could embody and all the mothers (herself, her ancestors, the land) in her life.
Farheen HaQ is a South Asian Muslim Canadian artist who has been living on unceded Lekwungen territory (Victoria, BC) for 20 years. She was born and raised on Haudenosanee territory (Niagara region, Ontario) amongst a tight-knit Muslim community. Her multidisciplinary practice which often employs video, installation and performance is informed by interiority, relationality, family work, embodiment, ritual and spiritual practice. Farheen’s current work focuses on understanding her family history on Canadian territories, caregiving and the body as a continuum of culture and time.
She has exhibited her work in galleries and festivals throughout Canada and internationally including New York, Paris, Buenos Aires, Lahore, Hungary, and Romania. Recent exhibitions include Sentirse en Casa at Casa Cultura Gallery, Medellin Colombia (2018), Being Home at the Comox Valley Art Gallery (2015), Fashionality at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (2012), Collected Resonance at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2011), The Emperor’s New Clothes at the Talwar Gallery, New York (2009), and Pulse Contemporary Art Fair, Miami (2008). Farheen received her BA in International Development (1998) from the University of Toronto, her BEd (2000) from the University of Ottawa and her MFA in Visual Arts (2005) from York University. In 2014, Farheen was nominated for Canada’s pre-eminent Sobey Art Award.
For more information about Haq and her work, please visit her website.
Being Home
Interpretive Essay by Karolina Bialkowska
Farheen HaQ’s Being Home shifts memory. It is akin to the feeling of opening your eyes for the first time after an extended closure. Everything looks a little strange, yet nothing is new. It’s an experience that finds me, an hour later, dialing the numbers to call my mom and hear her, see her, for the first time. Being Home complicates and then takes down the impermeable barriers of the public and the private woman.
I walk into the gallery and am immediately aware of my presence within it, in the same way I’m acutely conscious of how my body moves as a guest in someone else’s home – hushed tones, shuffling feet, an awareness of a certain granted access. The transformation of gallery to familiar home space is catalyzed by the careful arrangement of visual markers and intimate objects typically associated with hidden, private spaces – a dresser, a table, a chair.
Looped video images play in, on, and around these objects, activating them: The woman’s body and the things she touches every day constitute each other’s making.
A white dresser with a barely-floating frame plays a video of a woman stretching, rolling, folding, and gathering a length of white fabric. I turn left and encounter “Feast”, projected onto a side-turned grainy wood table is the image of the artist’s rising and falling belly button. I’m immediately moved to consider the table – activated over meals as a meeting space of agreement, of conflict, of love. Her belly button draws me to consider our connections to the women who bear us, bear our presence, and the violence we do onto their bodies and hearts. The rising, falling, grainy belly button connects her to her mother, to her grandmother, to her children. The body that feeds is the table that feeds. These are feasting places.
Her feet swing infinitely, projected through the bottom of an overturned white chair. Swinging legs recall a childish past. At the same time I also consider how much motherhood is about waiting for unknown futures. Waiting through days, years, tied shoelaces, birthdays, reclaimed lives, seeking elusive quiet and lost moments. How much is the way we feel time negotiated in the home? Those swinging legs complicate linearity.
Is home only that place we are always leaving? We close the doors on our homes and on the selves that live in them. HaQ does not allow the doors to close. She does not allow us to render invisible the spaces and places so inextricably woven through who we are and how our bodies exist on this land.
HaQ explores her overlapping identities – gender, ethnicity, feminism, and motherhood – in a way that is as moving as it is grounding. She reminds me of mothers who knead tablecloths and roti breads. The wrapping of fabric triggers a primal memory of a complex gendered body. The sensual enveloping fabric of a tablecloth contain the traces of the bodies it has held and fed.
The mounted display in the window gallery reclaims the space of the home. My original impression of the tea morphs and shifts when I watch it again, after experiencing Being Home. “Drinking From my Mother’s Saucer” represents the layers and bounty of a maternal body. The teacup is an homage to the sacrifice of the maternal woman, land, and home that pours itself into us.
The layers of HaQ’s show peel back to expose complexity of the taken for granted. The unravelling is a revelation of bodies, fabric, and conditions hidden within ritual of the day to day.