“Some of my children are not active in their faith anymore. Will they find themselves lost when I am gone? What will their children be like?”

 

-Quote from a participant in the ‘Figuring Out Home’ exhibition.

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West London’s Gunnersbury Park Museum holds a collection of photographs taken in Southall in the 1970s. The photographer, (soon-to-be-famous) Dennis Morris, was just a teenager at the time and Southall’s Sikh community welcomed him into their lives.

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Across 2023 and 2024 my excellent colleague Jennal Amin and the poet, artist, and filmmaker Narvir Singh ran a series of workshops around the photographs. Narvir, who is a Southall native, led participants from local community groups in an exploration of the ongoing significance of the photographs. Through photography and flow writing they explored themes including “can you miss a home you’ve never lived in?”, “what things make a home for you?” and “how do you make a home in a new place?”

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As Senior Curator my responsibility was to turn the outputs of the workshops into an exhibition. The Museum is over 30 minutes away from Southall and is also some distance from the parts of West London which have the most people of immigrant heritage. To get around this -in collaboration with my fantastic curator Ishwari Giga- I devised a touring exhibition. ‘Figuring Out Home’ went to local libraries and Southall Park. The Park was suggested by Southall Community Alliance as the place most accessible to the widest cross-section of society. To display the exhibition in the Park I commissioned a bespoke reusable travelling exhibition infrastructure from Install Archive (who were a delight to work with).