The Places We Carry

Aakansha Ghosh's MFA Defence
Wednesday, October 20, 2021 | 2:00 PM | Zoom | RSVP to sca_gpa@sfu.ca

Against the context of what has been my immediate urban landscape since moving to Canada, 

THE PLACES WE CARRY combines windows, text, and images to perform as memoirs of fragmented images of place and time, displaced, and now repositioned within a gallery space. 

Together, the three handmade books, a video and the site-specific installation build a dialogue both within and outside of the site. The piece interacts with its architecture, its built environment, and the sun’s movement. Alluding to a window’s dual quality of inside and outside as a symbol of interconnection that both reveals and dissolves invisible barriers, I map my attempts to understand the complexity of defining, sustaining, encountering, and accepting a place as a social complex rather than a geographical identity. By collecting windows across Vancouver, by stitching, painting, tracing, and binding books, and by experimenting with light, I explore the implications of individuality in relation to how a place becomes home. In these works, I attempt to weave an understanding of place and home in which each element negotiates its presence through the other.