Kanwal Dhaliwal Immigration

 Immigration: Some countries live on it by getting the best brains or brawn in the world, by simply giving them nationality and a place where they can explore and exploit their talents. Others forbid it, afraid. Some make anyone who leaves pay for all the education and food received when living there. Still others are happy to have our work but not our presence: one must pay taxes but cannot be a citizen. Sometimes we own land long before a land owns us.
Kanwal Dhaliwal has drawn, sculpted and painted the many themes of immigration, the country one grew up in, the country one learned to call home where everything looked the same and nothing was familiar: Homes with shoots but no roots, horizons of fool’s gold glimpsed while traveling, children who speak a strange language and look at you as if they do not know you, new bugs, new officiousness, strange climates . Often immigrants think of killing the past, of beginning afresh or of adventure, not that this too is an end. Many manage to forget they had to jump ignominiously through the eye of a needle and the thousand days of waiting. Meticulously, with deep introspection, Dhaliwal brings these sometimes vertiginous experiences into forms where we too may remember and reflect.