Source: The Conversation – UK
Home is often imagined as a physical structure or a fixed point on a map, something stable that we can locate and return to. Yet our earliest experiences of home are rarely so concrete. They are shaped by memory, sensation and emotion, held in fragments of sound, smell, language and feeling.
One Song, a socially engaged arts project by London-based artist Kadir Karababa, is currently on show at The Art House, a creative hub of artist studios, galleries and community workshop spaces in Wakefield, West Yorkshire.
Over the past few months, Karababa led a series of workshops with women based in the city with personal experience of migration or of seeking sanctuary. The project is inspired by Karababa’s grandmother and the songs shared by the women in his family.
The workshops involved music and singing, and each was followed by a shared meal. Workshop participants were then invited to share and record a song which transported them to the place they first called home. These recordings form part of an installation. Each woman and her chosen song appear in a video on a series of monoliths with built-in screens. The songs play continuously, with women sometimes singing alone, sometimes overlapping in a chorus of voices and languages. At times the women pause, as if listening. A call and response.
The monoliths are accompanied by a shelf*collection?* of objects, each one brought in by the participants. These everyday objects include photographs, a watch, a child’s dress and a film poster. On display with the objects are short testimonies from the women, describing the story of the song and object they have chosen to share.
Music, song, voice here all dislocate notions of home and belonging from static ideas of place. Instead visitors are moved to think of home as something relational and shared. As ephemeral, embodied and collectively imagined.
Stories of migration through song
In the exhibition’s wall text, Karababa explains that he wants this work to offer a dialogue which reflects the deep complexities of the world. It also speaks to his own family story of migration which echoes in the songs he heard his grandmother sing when he was a child.
Being in the exhibition space and hearing the different voices and songs is a highly affective experience. Participating in the workshops and being part of the installation offers an opportunity to share something that might not have been previously shared. It is also something that participants do not take on lightly. Offering something – a memory, a trace, a distant place and time – of this kind is inherently intimate. For participants, their sharing is an act of both hospitality and generosity.
The project and exhibition resonate personally for the two of us, as researchers and practitioners in socially engaged arts and participatory research. For Jessica this resonance is highly personal. One of the participants in the Wakefield-based strand of the project is her mother, Anne, who shares a Malagasy lullaby from her childhood in Madagascar.
The object she chose to display is a well-thumbed exercise book in which, as a child in the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote down the words to every song she knew. Etched on each page in fountain pen and biro are French and Malagasy songs, including hymns. The lullaby she shared – Etsy babeko razandriko izany – which translates as “let me carry you on my back my little brother”, is among the many she diligently recorded in her book over a period of eight years.
Jessica’s research explores people’s experiences of creativity in everyday contexts, often with arts-based approaches. The exhibition, therefore, and dialogue between the artist and participants, brought to light aspects of family history which had previously not been explored. She learnt something new about what home might be for her mother, in her memory.
Jessica’s mother wanted to be able to share something important, and to explore how, in sharing it, it might be preserved. It offered a chance for intergenerational dialogue, as well as for her mother to share something about her childhood in a language which she rarely now has the chance to speak. For both authors of this review, it also gave insights into what it’s like to participate in socially engaged arts projects and share experiences in relation to place and time.
The exhibition also asks important questions about categories and how we designate them. Who is a migrant, and at what stage are people recognised as such? Whose experiences are audible – and whose experiences matter? Each song and testimony offers a sense of being connected to multiple places. Collectively, the songs ask whether we only recognise how home feels when we are in a different place.
Louise’s recent artistic project, If Walls Could Talk, funded by Arts Council England, also explored these ideas by researching the history and stories that Chinese wallpaper holds for migrants, using participatory and interpretative practice. In her research she worked with students and community members with experiences of migration to the UK from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. Through arts-based workshops and discussions centred around food and recipes, the project complicated ideas of language and national identity and opened up new dialogues about home and belonging.
These conversations have never been more important than now, with participatory arts and research opening up spaces which invite us to share and learn from each other. One Song therefore reiterates that ideas of home are wholly individual; as much a feeling as a location.
One Song is at The Art House in Wakefield until August 31.
After this, it will be at Fabrica in Brighton from October 9 to October 28.
Jessica Mary Bradley has worked with The Art House including research and evaluation for community arts-focused projects since 2022. She holds a creative research studio there. Jessica Mary Bradley receives funding through the British Academy / Leverhulme small grants scheme (2025) in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust.
Louise Atkinson works with The Art House as an arts partner on Cripping Breath: Towards a New Cultural Politics of Respiration. Cripping Breath is led by the University of Sheffield and funded by a Wellcome Trust Discovery award. Louise also received Arts Council England funding for If Walls Could Talk.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/10/one-song-kadir-karababas-exhibition-uses-music-to-reimagine-home/