Farihah Aliyah Shah / Papaya Dreams
May 15 – June, 2024
Billboard Co-presented by AKA Artist-Run & PAVED Arts
This series began with a comment by my mother about fruit (specifically the papaya) not tasting the same here in Canada as it did back home in Guyana. The work is an exploration of my diasporic identity which at times feels like a fever dream; one part rooted, while the other in nostalgia, memories, and inherited stories that I resonate with and yet can’t grasp their magnitude. Although the papaya doesn’t taste the same, eating it with my mother and other members of the community feels like a portal to “home”.
In this tryptic, there is an image of the papaya in my grandmother’s house (now owned by my aunt) captured in my first visit to Victoria Village, Guyana alongside the fruit freshly cut open in my kitchen in Bradford, Ontario, and another of it held in my hand with the backdrop of our suburb. The fruit shifts geographically, its shape and form adapt and differs with every transition, the taste is altered, and yet the experience and tradition it holds remains.
