Solo Exhibition 2026 Oakland, California Photos by Zabrina Deng Khāneh be doosh is a Persian expression that resists direct translation. Literally “one who carries one’s home on one’s back,” it evokes not simply displacement, but the emotional condition of carrying home as both burden and longing. Conceived in a delicate dance to Somaieh Amini’s painting from the Ruptured Belonging series, first shown at ARTogether’s inaugural center exhibition in 2022, this installation holds the love, the life, the blood, and the bodies of those left behind, become a two-dimensional memories trapped in frames for the Khāneh be dooshs.

Solo Exhibition 2026 Oakland, California Photos by Zabrina Deng For years, while sitting at our dining table at ARTogether, I watched elderly neighbors of Oakland’s Chinatown pass our gallery with their shopping carts, carrying daily groceries. A simple reminder of life and nourishment. You would never leave an immigrant home hungry. In this installation, three shopping carts, each composed around a single color, transform a familiar neighborhood object into a portrait of the community that has surrounded and sustained ARTogether for years. The cart, an object of labor and necessity, becomes a vessel, holding not just groceries but the accumulated weight of a life built in a new place. Beyond my homage to Chinatown, the work celebrates the dignity of daily life and the quiet acts of nourishment, labor, and persistence through which immigrants make a place their own. It is an object of survival that becomes an object of belonging.