A Pakhtun Memory

Location: Art Car, Large Screen
by Tentative Collection

A Pakhtun Memory was directed and produced by the Tentative Collective, an arts collective based in Karachi, Pakistan and Niskayuna, NY.

Yaminay Chaudri: I love the idea of living room as a space that can do more than consume television. The opening up of this typically private space to public gathering in an intimately charged, locally relevant and globally productive way is not an easy task. I am honored to have had both my own work and the work of my team, The Tentative Collective, included in this event. I was thrilled to be a part of this varied community of artists, academics and filmmakers, and even more thrilled to have contributed to building a sense of community between diverging individuals.

As an artist, I make work about migration. The experience of having lived half of my life in Karachi and the other half in the United States has revealed many conflicts of belonging and rootless identity, these enrich my practice. The Houston-Karachi connection provided an opportunity to expand on personal displacement and share it with a larger audience. At a time when most of us are experiencing a loss of the local at the expense of the global, this exhibition with its carefully chosen site–an intimate living room–allowed a large conversation to come back home.

‘Home’ is an idea that puts the pieces together. For the Tentative Collective, a collective that makes collaborative works of art in public spaces, our Pakhtun Memory project explored how a home could be re-lived using memory and music. Even a marginalized squatter settlement of Pakhtun migrants in Karachi could be transformed for a few minutes by the powerful idea of home, and belonging to any place where one could imagine a homes existence.