Home is a Verb

Solo exhibition by Zahra Khanum

OPENING EVENT: 22 JULY 2025 6-8PM

In her debut solo exhibition, British-Bangladeshi artist Zahra Khanum presents Home is a Verb, a body of work exploring memory, care, and the cultural labour embedded within domestic spaces. Drawing from personal and collective experiences of British-Bangladeshi households in Plymouth and Birmingham, the exhibition engages with the quiet, often overlooked rituals that sustain diasporic life: hair oiling, DIY beauty practices, and the creation of fusion foods.

Home is reimagined here not as a fixed site, but as a series of lived gestures, rituals of survival, remembrance, and resistance. Domestic space, in Khanum’s work, is revealed as a site of emotional labour and political expression, especially for those navigating hybrid identities and intergenerational histories. The exhibition becomes a space where the domestic is intimately entangled with the political.

Working in painting, a new departure from her background in filmmaking, Khanum employs portraiture, symbolic motifs, layered figuration, and muted palettes to articulate internal landscapes shaped by migration, fragmentation, and cultural hybridity. Water appears as both metaphor and material, symbolising movement, memory, and the fluid, in-between spaces of diasporic belonging.

Here, memory operates not just as content but as method: inherited, embodied, and reassembled across generations. Acts such as concocting ancestral oil recipes, shared between mothers and daughters, become forms of radical care and cultural preservation. At its core, the exhibition aims to radicalise nostalgia, not as sentimental longing, but as the active labour of preserving memory and cultural traditions. Though visually calm and intimate, the work carries within it the weight of inherited trauma, fractured narratives, and a politics of remembrance.

Developed alongside her role as Discovery Media Assistant at The Box in Plymouth, this exhibition reflects Khanum’s ongoing research into how narrative, archive, and embodied knowledge shape identity within diasporic communities. Her shift toward painting reflects a desire for material engagement and slowness qualities that offer a counterpoint to the often-extractive pace of digital or institutional forms of cultural production.

Home is a Verb is both a personal archive and a curatorial proposition: to view home not as place, but as process: an act of becoming.

This Exhibition is made possible thanks to The CLIIK Community and The Talk Shop.

Find out more information here.