Asha Bee Abraham (Australia | Singapore)

www.ashabeeabraham.com

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Home is where you lay your hat, the comfortable place we return to after a long day. Home is also a fantasy we carry in our hearts and minds. In our globalised and dispersed world, many choose to leave our homes for study, work, love, or simply for space. Some create a new home away from home, some remain homesick, nostalgic for another place and time.

 

Where the heart is explores this more abstract, imagined version of home. It examines the feelings evoked by returning to our hometowns and family homes, and experiencing the changes and the sameness in their place.

 

Where the heart is sees participatory artist and human ecologist, Asha Bee Abraham, revisiting Singapore in an attempt to understand something about her (dis)connection with her hometown.

 

You are invited to join Asha in unpacking and examining the concept of ‘home’. For the duration of the festival, Asha will be making herself at home in a converted Fringe venue, inviting people to come in for a cup of tea and share their memories and imaginings of what the concept of ‘home’ means to them.

 

Where the heart is will unfold over the duration of the Festival as Fringe visitors–Singaporean residents, expats and tourists-contribute their thoughts and experiences. The ongoing conversation will involve interactive documentation of the dialogues in the venue space, as well as on an interactive website.

 

View her Hello Video

Asha Bee Abraham is a Melbourne-based Singaporean participatory artist and human ecologist. Her works focus on connections–connections to each other, connections to place and our wider ecologies, and connection to ourselves. Society, soil and soul.

Whether it’s the concept of a family since broken up, a childhood home now demolished, or a particular taste that can’t be replicated, the word ‘home’ evokes for many a place of comfort and a place of the past.

 

Where the heart is unpacks an issue very alive for artist, Asha Bee Abraham. Having left Singapore with her mother at the age of five, now, nearly 30 years later, Melbourne is well and truly ‘home’. But while that implies connection and community in one place, it means disconnection, cultural barriers and confusion in another.

 

We choose our life’s work for a purpose, often subconscious. Asha’s work around connections, as described in her bio, can be thought of as an attempt to mend her disconnection from her original home and the losses that has triggered. Where the heart is takes this trajectory to the next level.

 

Asha will draw on her capacity to enable intimacy between strangers to unpack personal stories of homes lost and found. Together with Fringe visitors, Asha will trace the commonalities in the concepts of ‘home’ that we carry with us in our hearts and minds. Together they will explore the dissonances between this image, the reality of childhood homes, and the homes we return now to of an evening. Together, they will come to terms with the elements of loss and change connected to past homes.