What is the definition of home and belonging for a generation that is growing up global? How do we associate the term ‘homeland’ with migration, exile, diaspora and multi-cultural existence? How valid are notions of loyalty to state, nationality, language, culture and tradition for citizens who are at home in the entire world?

These are the questions that have been raised in the current VM Gallery exhibition in Karachi, ‘Homelands — A 20th Century Story of Home, Away and All the Places in Between’. The show is curated by Latika Gupta, who explores this evolving phenomenon through art productions selected from the British Council Contemporary Art Collection. All the participating artists are British but their focus is not confined just to Britain because as Andrea Rose, director visual arts points out, “The ‘Britishness’ itself is now an increasingly fluid concept, with the capital city, London, home to 300 different nationalities.”

How language can create ‘worlds of difference’ within families is effectively projected in British-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira’s video triptych ‘Mother tongue’. Born in France to Algerian parents, Sedira now lives in England. Her video screens documentary-style conversations between three generations of women, each of whom speak in their mother tongues: Arabic, French and English.

In the first, Sedira and her mother talk in French and Arabic, in the second she speaks in French to her daughter who talks in English. The ‘disconnect’ is most apparent in the third segment where her English-speaking daughter and Arabic-speaking mother are unable to converse.

Similarly, ‘Shopna’, by Suki Dhanda also reveals the varying shades of cultural and political divides that members of minority communities face in host countries. Dhanda photographed 15-year-old Shopna, a British Bangladeshi teenager during her daily interaction with friends and family for over a year to capture the public and private lives of British Muslims in the UK now. Shopna is snapped wearing a black burka as she goes about the Whitechapel area of London where she lives — this contrasts with an image of her dreamily looking out of her bedroom window, with a net curtain shrouding her face. As a member of the first generation of British-born Asians, Dhanda could relate to her divided self as she herself had gone through the strangeness of cultural alienation.

Turner prize nominee Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, which had fled to Lebanon after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. In 1975, she was prevented from returning home from London after the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war. Her video Measures of distance (1988), consists of still photographs of her mother showering, superimposed with letters written by mother to daughter.

Hatoum reads these aloud in Arabic, then English. “It is not fair that this bloody war should take my daughters away from me to the four corners of the world,” her mother says in the video. The physical distance expressed in the letters is heightened by the closeness and intimacy implied by the bathing scene. This personal story of loss and separation can easily be applied to other exiled families the world over.

Susan Hiller’s ‘The last silent movie’ documents stories narrated by the last speakers of 25 extinct and endangered languages selected from anthropological sound archives. Many chose to narrate the unique myths of their communities. A black screen displays translations as subtitles but it takes a while to connect with the video and grasp the gravity of the issue. In this rat race called life so much is slipping so rapidly that the realisation of the loss is not even registered till it is all over.

As a show ‘Homelands’ definitely merits viewing — but with a catalogue in hand — if the intention is to engage with the artworks and comprehend the multiple aspects of this phenomenon. Most artworks resolve only after they are viewed in context. Migrations have altered family structures — culturally, politically, economically and socially. An old world is falling apart and a new sense of order is emerging and ‘Homelands’ tracks this transition through postmodern genres of video print and installation art.