This is a photograph of my late brother,
who was born with a visual impairment.
And you will see him holding in front of him this object,
a miniature version of a French piano.
The piano’s Eastern materiality and craftsmanship
made it part of applied decoration culture of objects in our home.
Now, my brother, unsure of what the world around him looked like –
this visual deprivation opened up a psychological space,
leaving him completely groundless.
Because I’m hearing challenged,
I know how he turned to piano
so its sound could reinforce for him that he was part of a real surrounding.
I feel when he would become restless,
this object, its sound and its shape would ground him back to the world.
I believe
objects have power to alter dimensions of reality in so many ways.
And in this context, they become more critical tools.
They are markers of our identity formation,
and they are symbols of resistance.
As someone who has to deal with things
and their meaning in everyday capacity of my life –
in making or teaching –
I find myself asking
in what circumstances does an object’s physical weight, its material
or a particular way it has been made
is outweighed by emotional weight put into it?
When I look at objects from pre-partition, especially in my elder’s archives,
I see how during migration these objects were wiped off their functional value
and replaced with a completely sentimental one.
Looking at my grandfather’s objects, his travels packed into ornate postcards,
and his poems dated 1944 and stretching to 1994
I have become a witness
to how his entire mental and creative self migrated and transformed
from pre-partition to post-partition identity.
How his external circumstances
demanded of him to produce a poetry journal, therefore an object.
These things have become carriers of my moral rights,
my moral obligation to not forget.
And given the urgency of migration,
his objects, now part of my immediate workspace at home,
they evoke a slow, humanized tendency in how they responded to partition.
Upon my own migration from Pakistan to US, to start my MFA,
these artifacts became my monumental references
of understanding home, belonging and alienation.
These carved and weaved symbols,
which are part of our collective identity back home,
when you install them in a new place,
you begin to communicate with these symbols
in two places at one time.
When objects are reconstructed
with the longing and displacement of a home,
they begin to acquire entirely new knowledge
about your actual identity and culture.
Through this I realized that an object, any object,
is shaped by the value of our experiences we invest in them.
An object always becomes visible through the meanings of these experiences.
If you look at the landscape of objects in your home,
you are looking at a visual arena of objects
which might be generational, spiritual, or about family relationships.
These objects hold their power
because of the particular moment they arrive in someone’s life.
When I come into contact with my mother’s artifacts –
her sewing machine or other compulsory artifacts of her dowry –
I put into her objects my questions about her female identity.
And I use my questions and her objects not to close her narrative,
but to open up a space of self-actualization
to understand freedom and restraints in my and my mother’s spaces.
Today in contemporary world,
all of us continue to collect and display objects,
to perform our role of individualism.
Whether it is designer furniture or a generational artifact
or even a fridge that becomes a shrine of our travel
and even keychains,
we use these objects as personal and fictional anthropologies
to protect, compartmentalize, and extend the boundaries of our self.
And in this, we end up behaving like ethnographers.
We become curators of our everyday desires and experiences.
Sometimes I feel all of us are a part or a sum of these things.
To understand who people are and what they might become,
we need to know what goes on between things and people,
which objects should be kept –
(Applause)
which object should be emotionally valued and should become part of our knowledge.
However, it is surprising how little we know of what things mean to people.
When you understand an object and its relationship to people,
you begin to defy stereotypes.
So, if it’s my mother’s sewing machine or even my own hearing device,
you begin to pay attention to an object’s capacity
to take in overwhelming knowledge for your identity transformation.
I feel, the more I make objects, the more I teach,
the more they give me immaterial knowledge,
and I use this knowledge as counter-narrative catalogue
to see how they can transform my and other’s lives.
(Applause)
These things convey for all of us
a moral understanding of our past and present.
And it is only in these spaces
that we begin to respect the process of understanding narratives,
so we can become more conscious, more informed,
and more empathetic individuals and makers.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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