The city inside us, 2019

An exhibition at the Distillery Gallery, Boston, MA with Azma Kazmi. A series of drawings, photographs and video installations.

In this exhibition, a meticulously curated assemblage of objects merges to form a complex constellation that interrogates the multifaceted nature of placemaking. This endeavor is deeply influenced by psychoanalytic theories, particularly Sigmund Freud's concept of the 'unheimlich,' or the uncanny, which serves as a theoretical framework for exploring spaces that oscillate between familiarity and unfamiliarity. Employing visual strategies that emphasize isolation and reduction, the exhibition aims to elicit a range of ambivalent subjectivities that complicate conventional narratives surrounding urban locales.

The exhibition is a discursive space where images and material artifacts are strategically positioned to establish intricate relationships. These relationships recreate experiential landscapes characterized by personal displacement, obscured historical narratives, and emotional geographies that defy easy articulation, comprehension, or documentation. By juxtaposing portrait photographs within this curated environment, the exhibition brings to the fore critical inquiries concerning our ephemeral and fluctuating relationships with place, monuments, and collective memory.

This juxtaposition catalyzes confronting the viewer with a series of new experiences that engender a sense of defamiliarization, thereby challenging pre-existing cognitive and emotional frameworks that govern our interactions with spatial environments. In doing so, the exhibition questions the stability of our bonds with place. It problematizes the notion of stability, revealing the inherent uncertainties and complexities underlying our relationship with the world.

Through this comprehensive curatorial approach, the exhibition seeks to contribute to academic and public discourses on the phenomenology of space, the psychology of place, and the semiotics of the built environment. It functions as a visual and intellectual exploration, inviting viewers to engage in a multi-layered interpretive process that extends beyond the immediate aesthetic experience to encompass broader ontological and epistemological considerations. Thus, the exhibition serves as a complex intertextual dialogue that intersects the personal, the psychological, and the sociocultural, offering a nuanced understanding of the intricate processes that constitute placemaking.