Installation • Concept • Material Research
A site-specific installation constructed from the sarees of the artist's paternal grandmother, built during the final year of a Fine Arts degree at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. The work explored whether the quality of shelter — as a psychological and emotional condition — could be transferred from a person to a space, and made available to strangers.
After her grandmother died, the artist kept her sarees. Not as relics — as material. The question that Hegira was built around was a simple one: could the quality that made a person a safe place be made inhabitable by someone who had never met her? The installation suspended the sarees from the ceiling of a gallery in the form of a tent. The structure was large enough to enter. People went inside.
What the artist did not fully anticipate was that the sarees had preserved, across years, the faint and specific scent of the woman who had worn them — slightly sweet, strangely calming. That scent permeated the installation and produced something that could not have been designed: an atmosphere of involuntary memory, available to strangers who had no memory to draw on. Viewers looked up. They pointed. They laughed — not from distance, but from within. The work was understood to be complete only when occupied.
Hegira raised formal questions that continue to organise the artist's practice: the distinction between an image that is faced and a space that is entered; the role of non-visual sensation in producing felt meaning; the conditions under which an artwork can generate something as specific and as fragile as a sense of safety. The installation cannot be reconstructed. The sarees exist. The scent is fading. Hegira is an Arabic word for a journey undertaken to escape danger and find safety. The installation borrowed the word for a smaller migration: the attempt to carry one person's quality of shelter into a room full of strangers, and leave it there.
The work was not about grief. It was about what a person leaves in cloth — and whether that is enough to constitute a presence.
Project: Hegira Institution: LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore Studio: Studio Apara Scope: Site-Specific Installation
