Making Home

BAC and the Gotland Art Museum proudly present artist and researcher Azadeh Fatehrad's exhibition Making Home, produced as part of the research project MaHoMe (2020-2024), supported by Nordforsk. Making Home highlights the role of mobile phones as links that connect individuals to their places of origin. It also highlights the relationship between modern technology and deeply personal memories and perceptions of home. The exhibition includes a fictional documentary, photographs and a slideshow that draws the viewer into the complex world of migration, memory and the search for belonging, and is the result of a collaboration between Baltic Art Center in Visby, Compass Collective and Kingston University in London.

Making Home is a story and a testimony of the common human experience of migration, return and integration. As part of the research project, artist Eva Hållsten was commissioned to lead four workshops in May and June 2022 in her home - a large old farmhouse with a lush garden in Stockvike Öja on southern Gotland. She invited about 15 people who had migrated to Sweden from Afghanistan and Syria in 2015-16. She was inspired by the fact that many of them wanted to preserve the flavours of their home country's cuisine for cooking in their new country. Using their mobile phones, the group gathered inspiration and information from relatives and friends to build a wood-fired oven to bake traditional bread, cook and eat together. All the workshops were filmed by cinematographer Stefan Kullänger, who captured memories and discussions about the tastes and smells of home.