The House

There is a shape I keep returning to. It has a roof, walls, a door, and windows. At its most reduced, it is a structure anyone would recognize. That recognizability is not incidental. It is the starting point.

I am not an architect. I am not reconstructing a specific place or documenting a memory. When I work with the house as a form, across sculpture, painting, and works on paper, I am working with what that structure does before it becomes personal, before it becomes yours or mine or anyone’s. I am interested in the house at the level of first principles: what it is composed of, what it separates, what it makes possible.

A house is, at its most basic, a set of structural decisions. A foundation anchors it to a specific ground. Walls define an interior and establish a boundary with everything outside. A roof closes the form and makes shelter possible. A door controls passage. Windows mediate between inside and out, admitting light and visibility without dissolving the boundary entirely. These components are not symbolic. They are a logic. They describe a relationship between structure, ground, and the life that takes place within.

The house has accumulated a great deal of meaning in cultural and theoretical writing, particularly in discourse around migration, diaspora, and displacement. It is routinely treated as a stand-in for origin, for the self that was formed somewhere specific and carries that formation forward. In this framework, the house does not simply shelter identity. It produces it, fixes it, and provides the reference point against which all subsequent movement is measured as distance or loss. The assumption that follows is almost automatic: the house is who you are, and to have left it, or to have never had a singular one, is to exist in a condition of incompleteness.

For many people that equation holds. For those who have built something of themselves in one context and carried it to the next, it does not. The equation reveals itself as an assumption rather than a truth. The house does not contain identity. It is one of the conditions through which identity keeps taking shape.

That is why I return to this form. Not because it holds answers about where I am from or where I belong, but because it keeps generating the right question. What remains structurally consistent about a self that has been built and rebuilt across different contexts? The house, reduced to its components and stripped of the accumulated cultural meaning that surrounds it, becomes an instrument for thinking, an analytical structure, a means of isolating the question without reducing it to autobiography.

In my paintings, many house forms appear together, clustered and varied in scale and orientation. The density is deliberate. It is an argument about how identity actually works: not as a single origin point, but as something constructed from multiple conditions, multiple contexts, and multiple structures of grounding. No single version makes the complete picture. The accumulation is the point.

In sculpture, the forms are fewer and more concentrated. They exist in three dimensions, which changes what they ask of a viewer. People stand before them and sometimes say: this reminds me of somewhere. They name a place, a city, a neighborhood. That response does not trouble me. It confirms something. The house form, when reduced to its structural logic without the specificity of any particular architecture, becomes shared. It activates something in the viewer that belongs to their own experience of place and grounding. The thinking is mine. What it opens belongs to whoever encounters it.

What the house is not, within my practice, is a metaphor for loss. It does not stand in for a homeland left behind or a belonging that cannot be recovered. That reading reduces the work and, more importantly, misrepresents the intellectual position from which it is made. I am not processing a fixed origin. I am examining what origins actually are: not predetermined points that define identity in advance, but structures that support presence without determining it. Roots, understood this way, are enabling conditions. They bear on identity without closing it.

I return to the house because the question it holds remains open. Identity is a subject I continue to research, and the house is the instrument through which that inquiry keeps moving. Each work is not a conclusion but another deliberate return to the same set of questions, approached from a different scale, a different material, and a different configuration of the same essential structure.

Rim Albahrani is a Swedish-Iraqi interdisciplinary artist, curator, and researcher based in New York.