Hasan Ali Kadiwala
Aashiyaana (Home), 2025
Letterpress ink and etching on zinc plate
30.5 x 41.9 cm
This etching draws directly from my memories of the brick-making areas in my village, where entire families lived and worked amidst stacks of bricks and temporary shelters. The scene I have captured here belongs to one such family’s home. I witnessed how, with the arrival of the first monsoon rains, their fragile houses often suffered damage, and yet life continued children played in the open spaces, daily chores carried on, and small inscriptions in Urdu and Arabic marked the presence of faith and identity within these modest surroundings. The work is not only about a physical space but also about the resilience of those who lived there. Their homes and lives were shaped by both vulnerability and endurance, by cycles of construction and loss that repeated each year. This particular family has since left the site, but their presence lingers in memory, layered into the texture of this work. For me, the etching becomes a record of place, people, and the fragile shelters that held their everyday existence.