Ghar: Home, Language and Landscape for Sonal Kantaria

During the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, Autograph commissioned Sonal Kantaria to participate in the project, Care | Contagion | Community – Self & Other, in order to reflect on the wider context of the pandemic. Expanding on the notion of “ghar” (home), Kantaria created a series of images around her childhood home in Hertfordshire, located in southern England. Rendered in monochrome, the series is presented with a voiceover that relays verses from the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. The work contains a diasporic play on language as the artist juxtaposes the Sanskrit verses with the English countryside while retaining a certain degree of neutrality towards these landscapes. 

Kantaria’s images signpost a moment of transition in her practice as she shifts from representing the experience of marginal communities in Australia and Africa to a personal exploration of home as she perceives it in Hertfordshire. The sky, fields and country roads simultaneously become markers of her home as an individual and the identification of open borders through a neutral, unspecified approach to the landscape. This visual language is carried forward from the photographer’s earlier work—in Western Australia and in fields of harvest in Africa—to depict the classic English countryside in Ghar. The similarity of the three—marked by the centrality of the landscape—carries forward a broader understanding of home as both a place of belonging through a personal relation and a place anonymous of identity. In this treatment of the landscape as a site of reflection, “ghar” (home) for Kantaria becomes a language that allows for comfort, rest and care.

^{(Featured Image: Sonal Kantaria, Varda, 2020; Commissioned by Autograph for Care | Contagion | Community — Self & Other.  Image courtesy of the artist.)} 

Interview recorded on 03 November 2021.