Just down the street from Surrey city hall, irregular shapes speckled and marbled in vibrant colours are stacked almost six metres high. Sanctuaries of Belonging is a series of four sculptures by German-born artist Alex Proba inspired by Surrey’s South Asian communities.
Proba drew from a poem titled “Begumpura”—a spiritual concept in Sikh culture that means “a city without sorrow”—by Canadian multidisciplinary artist Keerat Kaur. Sanctuaries of Belonging is a conversation between Proba and Kaur in which public art and language celebrate South Asian culture in British Columbia.
“In a geographical space, you want to see your inner world reflected outside, especially when it comes to things like language,” Kaur notes by phone from her home in Burnaby, B.C. “It’s so tied to cultural identity. Punjabi is one of those languages that a lot of people speak, but I think the diaspora does struggle with it.” Kaur herself was born to a Punjabi family in Ontario, where she was immersed in Sikh treasures and poetics, where begumpura is a passage in a sacred text. She explains that begumpura is not necessarily a physical space but one that you can build within yourself. “I had my own take on it, and I use symbols from nature to speak about the idea of a land without sorrow just within having that in our own hearts and something we can carry with us everywhere.”
“The poem speaks about longing, belonging, and the idea of a place where one can finally feel at home,” Proba says, speaking to me virtually from New York City. Instead of illustrating the poem, she wanted to respond to its atmosphere and the emotion behind it. Her early sketches came from that place: shapes that feel soft, uplifting, protective, and open. They were informed by pomegranates and rubies—symbols of protection and abundance in Punjabi tradition—found in the poem.
From the initial idea to installation at Bosa Properties’ new Parkway residences, the project took a little over one year. The two artists were connected through a public art consultant, and the pair wanted to stay true to each other’s practice, turning a collaboration into a conversation. Proba, whose work ranges from collaborations with Louis Vuitton and Hoka to eclectic home goods and kitchen design, worked closely with her fabrication teams, reviewing engineering drawings and testing colours to achieve the handmade ceramic look at a large scale using three-dimensional forms with raised and tactile surfaces. Many months of milling, building internal structures, coating, sanding, and sculpting textures helped the sculptures create the illusion of movement, each oddly shaped component teetering off the edge of another but standing tall and firm.
Meanwhile, Kaur worked on presenting her poetry in bilingual inscriptions—English and Punjabi—with the Punjabi text presented in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts to include speakers with roots in the eastern and western Punjab regions respectively.
“You can have one single line of poetry, and it can be interpreted in so many different ways,” she says. “It’s an equalizer, but it also lets you find your own path and expand your thinking.” Proba notes that “colour is one of the strongest emotional tools in my work. I use it to create joy, warmth, and curiosity.”
The sculptures invite curiosity. They remind me of children’s toys in all ways but in scale, bright and chunky globules towering over the concrete beneath my feet. Kaur sees public art as “hierarchy breaking,” because everyone can interact with it outside the confines of traditional art galleries. As an artist with a background in architecture, she appreciates the way a studio practice such as sculpture can merge into an urban and architectural space. Proba feels that the beauty of public art is that you can stumble upon it, and it can shift the mood of a day, making someone pause or feel more connected to where they live as the piece becomes part of the everyday experience of a city.
“Belonging is something we create for one another,” Proba says. “My hope is that these sculptures offer a small piece of that feeling in Surrey.”
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