Sculpture series · 1981–91
Black aluminium houses set on wheels turn shelter into a portable emblem of migration, memory, and unsettled belonging.
Date1991
MediumCast and painted aluminium
StructureMore than 80 units
Dimensions12 × 8½ × ¾ in.
In House on Wheels I, more than eighty cast and painted aluminium units multiply the outline of a home. Wheels give each dark house the possibility of movement, turning a fixed architectural form into an image of migration and impermanence.
The repetition can read as a community, a caravan, or a scattering. A Christie’s presentation of a related group shows how the units can occupy space collectively, while each small house retains the intimacy of a personal emblem.
House on Wheels II, made a decade earlier, compresses the idea into a single cast-aluminium form with three circular wheels. Together the works show Zarina returning to the house not as a stable address, but as something carried through memory.
Material distinctions
The exact photographs and object data remain attached to their own records.
1981
Three circular wheels animate the compact house form, joining architecture to the possibility of departure.
View work →Further works
The recorded count is retained. The photograph does not by itself establish the complete installation or the meaning of the listed dimensions.
View work →The auction catalogue corroborates the series while documenting a differently counted group. The records remain separate.