NSA Gallery
A Place Called Home
Zayd Minty
Exhibiting Artists: Sunil Gupta, Chila Burman, Moti Roti, Omar Badsha, Usha Seejarim, Faiza Galdhari, Zen Marie
‘A Place Called Home’ is an exhibition of photographic, print, video, web-based and installation works by artists of Indian/ South Asian descent. It is bound to resonate in South Africa where over a million people originally hail from the Indian subcontinent.
Curated by Zayd Minty, the show documents what contemporary artists of the South Indian Diaspora have produced in the process of making ‘home’ the place of their birth or by adopting as ‘home’ the place to which they have chosen to move.
The show includes work by both local and international artists, amongst them: Sunil Gupta (India/ Thailand/ Canada/ UK), an artist who uses his own history as a gay HIV positive person who has lived in three continents; Chila Burman (UK) who was active in the black British arts movement of the 80`s and the renown collective Moti Roti (Trinidad/ Pakistan/ UK) whose dynamic and visually lush projects, inspired by the carnival traditions, engage subtly in transformative social commentary.
The South African contingent includes key artists such as Omar Badsha who rose to prominence as a lyrical documentary photographer during apartheid days. Badsha, together with younger upcoming artists, Usha Seejarim, Durban-based Faiza Galdhari and Zen Marie were all commissioned to produce new work for this show.
Zayd Minty is a cultural producer and organiser who was born and educated in Durban but has worked, since 1991, in Cape Town, particularly around issues of culture and transformation. He was previously artistic director of the Cape Town Festival (2002) and is presently deputy director of the District Six Museum. Amongst his curatorial achievements are ‘Isintu’ (1998) which showed at the SA National Gallery and ‘Returning the Gaze’ (2000), a public art project. He is a fourth generation South African of Gujerati/ Indian descent.
‘A Place Called Home’ was developed by Minty while he was a Rockefeller Fellow at Emory University in USA. The exhibition runs concurrently with the 25th Durban International Festival, which will screen a number of related films. An educational programme forms part of the project and includes engagements with schools as well as a set of discussion forums around issues affecting people of Indian descent in South Africa
