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For Khurram Salman, an artist born and raised in Bahrain to Pakistani parents, the question Min Wain? (Arabic for ‘Where are you from?’) is as familiar as it is unsettling, making it the perfect subject for artistic enquiry in his installation exploring identity and belonging.
Created during Al Riwaq’s Application 004 Art Residency earlier this year, a video of the Min Wain? installation was recently shared by Khurram and is sparking conversations around diaspora, memory and identity.
“I am a huge believer in the hyphenated identity – I am a Pakistani-Bahraini,” the 32-year-old visual artist and photographer told GulfWeekly during a recent interview.
“Bahrain is home, and hence the homeland. But because my parents originally come from Pakistan… I would also call that the motherland.
“The idea for this project came about during a routine conversation with a colleague, when, after telling her I was from Pakistan but grew up here, she asked, ‘Do you get homesick?’
“It threw me off because, in a way, I am home, so why should I be homesick?
“Should I be homesick? And I almost felt guilty for not being homesick.”
The installation unravels this paradox, showing how home can be both anchor and mirage.
Min Wain? is centred in a 32-grid panel spelling out the word ‘Home’ in binary code.
Each square is filled with a 1, 0, or question mark (?) representing citizens, non-citizens, and those who exist in the undefined, liminal space between.
The installation is also textured with the everyday language of cultural exchange, like food.
For example, on a shelf is Rooh Afza (rose) syrup, imported from South Asia, finding its place beside Bahraini margadoosh (distilled herbal water).
Fragments of Khurram’s personal history surface throughout the work.
One element features a Polaroid frame of the four houses he has lived in across Bahrain, which are the only addresses he has ever known.
Another engages with the Gulf tradition of elaborate family trees, mapping ancestry back through generations.
“I don’t know beyond my grandfather, for example,” he admitted. “That’s the plight of people who had migrated.”
Accompanying the installation is a video that layered voices and imagery to mirror the dissonance of ‘Desi Khaleejis’, caught between homeland, motherland, and the unsteady terrain of in-betweenness.
“My nephew recently went on vacation to Pakistan, and when he returned, he told me that while he liked it and enjoyed having his cousins around, the experience also reminded him of my piece and trying to navigate what home is,” Khurram explained.
Through his piece, Khurram is also highlighting a need for intentional dialogue around what is kept, what is adapted, and what is quietly lost as cultures blend.
He points to the ubiquitous Bahraini staple of karak tea as a blend, which traces its linguistic roots back to Urdu, where kadak means strongly flavoured, and its culinary roots to the Indian diaspora found around the region.
“When you look at it from a social discourse perspective, we’re not having these conversations – it’s on autopilot,” he explained.
“There’s a very binary system of identity – either you’re from here or you’re not.”
For diasporic families, this often translates into what Khurram calls ‘permanent temporariness’, where people settle down and children grow up without belonging fully to either their adopted home or their ancestral motherland.
“Visitors to the exhibition resonated with different elements… picking them out and sharing their stories,” Khurram added.
For his piece, Khurram drew inspiration from the book Encapsulated Volume 1: Photoessays on Khaleejiness, which contains the curated works of 16 Khaleej-based photographers, and essays by five cultural academics including Manishankar Prasad, who conceptualised ‘Desi Khaleejiness’.
The video about the project was created by Khurram’s fellow Desi Khaleeji and well-known photographer Fadhi Muhammed.
As he turns to the future, Khurram wants to explore this identity across the Arabian Gulf, and how it translates locally in countries like Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia.
“I would love to be able to have more of these conversations and develop more ideas,” he added. “Not as an answer to what a Desi Khaleeji identity is, but to still keep that conversation going.”
For more details, follow @ikhurram.salman on Instagram.
