What is the experience of mobility and migration in an artist’s work? In this post, Simone Wille explores the artworks of the contemporary Pakistani artist Huma Mulji, recently on show in Plymouth (UK), and how memory and belonging inform the multiple journeys — emotional, physical, intellectual and artistic — of creativity, and how they may (in)advertently resonate with wider experiences of belonging.
Your Tongue in My Mouth is Mulji’s first solo exhibition in the UK. On view are new works by the artist, which she made especially for this exhibition, partly in Karachi — where she grew up and lived most of her live — and partly in Bristol, where she has a studio, is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of the West of England Bristol, and now lives with her family. Not least for this reason, the composition of this exhibition is informed by artistic choices about how to make connections between geographies, histories, social environments and lived lives; about what to exhibit from life in a former colony to that in the adopted home, the former Empire; about how to re-establish an art practice that is largely concerned with uncertainties, with the insignificant, the non-linear and the everyday. In this blog, I will reflect on what the artist put on display at Plymouth and how this possibly resonates with the 75 years of Pakistan’s birth and independence.
