Crossing Home
Artwork Description
| Crossing Home explores how displaced Kashmiri Pandits continue to move between homeland and exile through memory, ritual, language and daily life activities. The photographs show Sharada letters, the lost script of Kashmir traced on a fogged window, artificial snow in a birthday in exile to recall Kashmir’s winter, Chinar tree from Kashmir planted in a pot in exile, and a ritual gathering at Kheer Bhawani temple under strict security in Kashmir with many visitors returning from exile. Together, the images suggest that exile goes beyond a journey away from home, and is an ongoing crossing between place, memory and belonging. |
Artist Statement
Crossing Home is a photographic work on displacement, memory, and partial belonging among the Kashmiri Pandit community, many of whom have lived in exile since the 1990s. The work responds to the theme of Crossings by looking beyond physical movement across borders. It explores the emotional and cultural crossings that continue long after displacement. The selected photographs show small acts through which homeland is carried. A finger traces Sharada letters onto a fogged window, briefly making a largely forgotten script visible again. Artificial snow falls during a birthday celebration in Delhi, recalling the Kashmir winter in exile and separation. Chinar tree planted and nurtured away from Kashmir in a pot, turns landscape into a portable form of memory. At Kheer Bhawani Temple, ritual gathering serves as a temporary return to sacred geography, in the presence of security forces which shows the unresolved tension surrounding that return. These images suggest that exile is a repeated movement between homeland and exile, past and present, continuity of ritual and political rupture, tangible and intangible memory. The work questions how displaced communities continue to sustain belonging when return is uncertain. |
Sarah Jabbari
Sarah Jabbari is an Iranian visual anthropologist and documentary photographer based in London. She holds a BFA in Photography from the Tehran University of Fine Arts, an MFA in Art History and a PhD in Fine Arts from India, and an MA in Visual Anthropology from the Granada Centre at the University of Manchester. Her book, Early Perso-Parsi Visual Encounters: A Dialogue with India, examines gender representation in nineteenth-century photography of Iran and the Parsis of India. Sarah has worked with marginalised communities, including Iranian Baluch, Zoroastrians, Parsis, and Kashmiri Pandits. She is a recipient of The British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants and is currently developing a book on Kashmiri Pandit identity, memory, and displacement. Her work has been presented internationally, including at the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the British Academy. |