Rupert Enticknap
The worst kind of sickness is homesickness (2024)
multimedia installation with textile, stereo sound, photography, performance
The strongest memory I have of Granny is her voice: the melodious lilt of her Indian-English, which despite other silences she could not hide. Today, the most common answer to the questions I have is “I don’t know” or “It wasn’t spoken about.” And yet, I know how to brown the onions…
The worst kind of sickness is homesickness is about an Anglo-Indian woman whose identity was created by British colonialism, then partly erased when she left Lucknow after Partition and migrated to England in 1952. It is a gesture of hospitality that invites an audience into the private archive of oral traces left by her on a single 90-minute cassette tape. It builds a non-conventional temple for the stories that unfold and those that are folded away—a collage of the shrines that she created and re-created. Playing with what Anjali Arondekar terms “re-presenting absence,” the work hosts those that have been lost or silenced as guests of honour at a picnic.
