Imagining Elsewhere

Imagining Elsewhere brings together artists who engage landscape not as a fixed or empirical reality, but as a site of projection—shaped by fantasy, memory, and desire. Throughout the exhibition, artists traverse great distances, conjuring places that are remembered, misremembered, inherited, or entirely invented.

 

The exhibition marks the 35th anniversary of Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, a seminal essay collection that described "Indias of Imagination”: constructed, often fantastic visions of a country left behind. In Rushdie’s account, distance from a real homeland is posited not solely as a loss, but as a generative space for reverie and world-building. In diasporic contexts, where relationship to homeland are mediated by distance, geographies are shaped as much by absence and reconstruction as by presence. Home is not a static location, but an evolving set of constructs that reflect the conditions of their imagining. The “elsewhere” becomes a composite—part lived reality, part projection—formed through fragments of memory, inherited narratives, and acts of longing.

 

Working across both representational and abstract modes, the artists in the exhibition move fluidly between exterior, physical environments and interior, emotional states— often collapsing the distinction between the two. Maya Seas, Anna Sidana Kuldeep Singh, and Khushna Sulaman-Butt render landscapes that appear legible and grounded, while subtly inflecting them with elements of displacement or unreality. Meanwhile, Joya Mukerjee Logue, Ammama Malik, Hiba Schahbaz, and Omer Wasim construct atmospheres, fragments, or spatial cues that evoke place without ever fully locating it. The worlds they create stray from realist expectations: emotions and aesthetics are heightened, and narratives embrace speculation and invention.

 

They draw from layered sources—archives, maps, photographs, oral histories, and the porous circulation of digital images under globalization. In doing so, they complicate any straightforward distinction between “real” and “imagined” place to envision new realms of belonging. Exploring new modes of storytelling and world-building, these artists create spaces wholly their own, suggesting that landscape is not simply observed, but continually produced—through acts of imagining, remembering, and translating.