When denied home we build a Memory Palace
Artwork photos courtesy of the artist
by Sobia Ahmad
16x32 in., digital collage on chiffon. 2018. (Diptych, Edition of 3)
GLB-2020-2
Acquired into the GLB Art Collection July 2020.
“These works on chiffon approach my elusive feelings and memories of places in relation to the notion of home as an immigrant. In When denied home we build a Memory Palace, I collaged images of my childhood home in Pakistan and wrote repetitively in Urdu. These fragmented images become imagined recollections, floating on a flimsy, translucent surface that responds to the slightest changes in air and light. As these elements shift, so does this memory palace.”
Sobia Ahmad's interdisciplinary practice maps the various ways the personal and the political overlap. By charting her own experiences and community narratives and weaving them with current and historical socio-political contexts, she highlights the inseparability of the self and larger power structures. The work poses questions like: What confirms or dissipates our sense of belonging? What effects do policies have on our personal and collective psyches? And how can our deeply intimate struggles of belonging inform larger conversations about national identity, notions of home, cultural memory, and gender?
Born and raised in Pakistan, Sobia Ahmad moved to the United States at the age of fourteen. She graduated in 2016 with Honors from the Bachelor’s in Studio Art Program at the University of Maryland College Park. Her work has been reviewed in several major publications such as Al Jazeera English, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post and has been included in multiple collections. She has exhibited internationally—including at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in New York, Queen Mary University in London, and the Women Filmmakers Festival at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC. Ahmad received a Vermont Studio Center fellowship award in 2018, was the 2019 recipient of the Next Generation/Sanctuary Artist Fellowship at VisArts in Rockville, MD, and is a 2019-2020 Halcyon Arts Lab Fellow in Washington DC.
Photo courtesy of the artist