Always Coming Home is my new multi-room immersive installation at Focal Point Gallery in Southend.

The installation combining moving image, photography, sculpture, LED ticker tape installations and sound to create an interactive space where multiple realities and speculative futures exist simultaneously, exploring the notion of exile as a shared human experience.

Basu’s diverse practice borrows from South Asian Futurism, speculative and science fiction to focus on the relationship between systems of power and bodies, particularly brown bodies. For this new installation Basu uses her own experience as an immigrant in the UK to investigate the complexity of transnational identity and the extended trauma of having to leave home due to violence.

The installation draws its title and inspiration from the novel Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin, which imagines the lives, culture, and stories of a future people that exist after modern society has collapsed, serving both as a critique and alternative to established industrial, patriarchal and imperial ways.

At the centre of Gallery 1 a moving image work unfolds across a large, rocky, semi-spherical sculptural screen. This film takes the form of hallucinatory, nested dreams entangled with the journey of ascent of a supernatural entity. It embodies perspectives from the margins, from individuals who live between realities, between nations, between homes, and who exist in a constant state of return, always in the process of coming home. The work brings together a cacophony of original and collected footage – magical, realist, ecological, and dystopian – reframing the contemporary landscape of contested borderlands, state violence against indigenous communities, and gender politics.

In Gallery 2, a multichannel work plays across small circular screens embedded within sculptural pieces. These films are kinetic works that feature the artist in movement at different times and states. They are an assemblage of 16 mm film, surveillance cameras, and archives of women performing, urban architecture, flags, protests, and urban birds and foxes, included as metaphors for those that exist on the edges of society, who feel the pressure of invisibility. The films explore embodied resistance with reference to themes of fear, existentialism and alienation from society and oneself, mapping internal and external landscapes on the journey towards liberation and release.

Basu uses recordings of natural and abstract sounds to create an interplay between this world and others. Industrial sounds, electricity pulses and mechanical drones are remixed with the sound of women chanting and bells, to create an ambient soundscape that disrupts time and place, and to draw connections between the artist’s dual states of being, connecting her roots in India and South Asia with her present life in the UK.
- Laura Bowen, Curator


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