A place is made where the streets are “smelly” like home. A place is made through a handshake of “live and let live” between landlords and tenants. A place is made in which there is an ineffable certainty of safety . A place is made so it can be a mooring for kin who escaped arson and carnage. Two decades later. A place is made and it is desirable for a new high/art public who are pretending to get it. A place is made where the different publics of the city feel “safe”. A place is made by people who don’t feel the same safety where the rest of the city’s publics roam. A place is made where those who first cushioned the cold cement feel hesitant to enter. A place is made where the people’s dearth of time to respond to disrespect is mistaken to be docility and hospitality. A place is made where sacred food practices designed for our old gods are sleeplessly generated and mindlessly depleted. A place is made reluctantly for “Rice Beer Paglus”. A place is made to feel like home, but do we get it?

The Exhibition is an ongoing practice of collectivising in giving form to some of the grumblings deep in our hearts about this place that is made within Humayunpur. The Curator positions herself as a niece of Humayunpur who has been a receiver of joy her aunts offer and a witness to their immaculate acuity during moments of derision. The themes are guided by these emotions and an attempt at sieving through the bargains made in making a safe place through the framework of “Place Making”. These are Bargains made between Landowner and Tenant, both identities with complicated histories of belonging in the capital. The Exhibition provides for each artist to espouse divergent expressions of the place that run parallel with their personal experiences of Humayunpur. It is cautioned that this practice is not interested in an exercise of representing the entire region beyond the chicken neck. While some of the artists respond to the history and “North-East” experience the place offers, the exhibition is also shaped by the Curator’s ongoing research on the incessant migration to Delhi from her home state. As this is being written in Delhi, irrational havoc carries on in Manipur. The exhibition asks, would Humayunpur not have been as desirable or cool without the unique political instability of a state that has forced its people out to achieve their dreams of a peaceful coexistence in this place? It also hopes to provoke the Delhi Publics to ask themselves whether it is fine to go on devouring a “niche” sum of experience (only to be replaced by the next exotic heritage) sans a careful math of its variables. Finally, this collaboration also responds to the collective exasperation felt by a people from a frontier region towards an expectation placed on them to situate themselves within intricate historiographies and gnarly local politics, perhaps this is a rebellion and the curation and artworks are for those who might get it.

Participating Artists
Bellona Yumnam
Children Supported by Centre for Women & Girls
David Yambem
Felix Chungkham
Jacob Nunthuk
Lamhoiching Mangte
Menty Jamir
Parismita Singh
Rachungailiu Gonmei
Saadgi G, Shashank Shekhar
Sarah Lalhrietzuol
Shiarlua Goldminson Aimol