Poulomi Basu’s Always Coming Home transforms Focal Point Gallery into a space of layered realities where memory, imagination and the politics of displacement converge. Across multiple rooms, performance, photography, sculpture, sound and moving-image intertwine to create environments that are immersive, sensory and intellectually resonant. At the heart of Basu’s work is a profound interrogation of exile as a shared human experience and a radical act of reclamation for those rendered invisible. Basu asks audiences to “understand how one’s perceptions of place, body and belonging can be disrupted,” re-imagining archives and creating them anew as “a radical act of world building and resilience in which those who continue to be rendered invisible can reclaim their narrative.”
Basu’s installations navigate the delicate balance between presence and absence. In Gallery 1, a multichannel moving-image spans a semi-spherical screen, while screens dispersed among sculptural objects in Gallery 2 extend the narrative into fragmented intimate spaces. Personal letters, photographs and found videos merge with invented dreamscapes, producing a dialogue between lived experience and speculative futurism. Basu’s work explores “the relationship between systems of power and bodies, particularly brown bodies,” using her own experience as an immigrant in the UK to illuminate the extended trauma of displacement while simultaneously imagining avenues of liberation.
This approach resonates with the work of Shirin Neshat, Hito Steyerl and Deana Lawson, though Basu develops it in her own transmedia language. Neshat’s video and photographic installations interrogate women’s lives within political systems often positioning the viewer in liminal spaces between witness and participant, a dynamic that echoes Basu’s invitation to inhabit worlds shaped by marginality. Steyerl’s layered essayistic multimedia works similarly collapse documentary and fiction, creating speculative realities in which migration, visibility and power are constantly in negotiation. Basu shares this fluidity, extending it into spaces that are tangible, interactive and sensorial. Lawson, meanwhile, foregrounds intimacy, the body and communal identity in photography, emphasising agency and care. Basu takes these concerns further, merging the personal and collective through light, sound and sculptural intervention so that embodiment becomes a shared spatial experience.
The exhibition’s sensory richness reinforces its conceptual depth. Interactive objects, shifting lights and resonant soundscapes heighten the visitor’s awareness of presence and absence, mapping both internal and external landscapes. Themes of alienation, absurdity and existential reflection permeate the work, yet they are counterbalanced by threads of resilience and hope. Through layering “lived experiences, both personal and gathered, with invented dreamscapes,” Basu constructs a space in which displacement is not only acknowledged but transformed into critical reflection and imaginative possibility.
Within these immersive spaces, Basu’s work functions as an act of radical world-building. Archives and personal histories are not static; they are re-imagined, allowing those who have been silenced to reclaim their narrative. Visitors are invited to experience these archives as living entities, to confront how perceptions of place, body and belonging can be disrupted, and to participate in the co-creation of meaning. The work demonstrates the power of contemporary art to illuminate systemic injustices, probe the subtle violences embedded in society and open spaces for resilience and resistance.
By integrating archival material, speculative fiction and sensory experience, Basu situates her practice at the intersection of personal and political, past and future. Her installations draw us into the tension between what has been endured and what might be imagined, revealing the possibility of agency even within structures of exclusion. In dialogue with Neshat, Steyerl and Lawson, Basu demonstrates how contemporary artists can transform the gallery into a space of empathy, critical thought and imaginative engagement. Each work is simultaneously intimate and expansive, private and public, reflecting the multiplicity of experience that defines our contemporary world.
Always Coming Home is more than an exhibition; it is an intervention. It urges audiences to reflect on the complexities of transnational identity, the politics of archives and the enduring consequences of exile. It also offers a vision of liberation, a place where narratives of invisibility are reclaimed and where resilience is enacted through creation. Basu’s installation confirms her as a pioneering voice in transmedia practice and Focal Point Gallery provides a platform for her work to resonate, provoke and inspire.
Through this immersive and carefully layered exhibition, Basu demonstrates how art can illuminate injustice while simultaneously imagining alternative ways of being. In Always Coming Home, we encounter a world both familiar and speculative, a space where memory, displacement and hope coexist and the act of engagement becomes a shared experience. It is a work that lingers beyond the gallery, a testament to the power of art to challenge, inspire and reimagine the possibilities of presence, belonging and resilience.
Always Coming Home is at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea from 1 October 2025 to 3 January 2026: fpg.org.uk
Words: Anna Müller
Image Credits:
All images: From the series ‘Always coming Home’. Courtesy the artist.
