(UN) BELONGING is a drawing installation by Sabina Haque exploring the cycle of welcoming and excluding, and what it means to belong in a new community. (UN)Belonging includes fifteen suspended life-size ink drawings of silhouetted bodies and maps of contested borderlands on layered sheets of DuraLar. The installation invites viewers to move between drawings depicting the mountains of Kashmir disrupted by lines of control at the Pakistan/India border. Other silhouetted figures navigate the liminal space of the Sonoran Desert; the US/Mexico border cuts through the landscape drawing on the reverse. 

I picked these two borders — the Sonoran Desert in Arizona/Mexico and Kashmir on the border between India and Pakistan — because my own lived experience intersects with these geographies. My ten-year-old father crossed the newly made border between India and Pakistan in 1947, along with 15 million people in the world’s largest migration of the century. — Sabina Haque