The Indian artist Rummana Hussain, 46, evokes a long journey in a small span in this installation. It begins with suspended pieces of dark cloth suggesting veils worn by Islamic women and continues with a few photographs: a Mogul bridge in India, a harbor that could be anywhere (it is, in fact, in Bombay) and a shot of an Indian woman in a shop window, taken in Jackson Heights, Queens, which has a large South Asian population.
This deliberate confusion of locations and cultures is expanded on in the show's most telling component, its centerpiece video. Its first and recurring image is of a woman (the artist) wearing ankle bells like those of Indian classical dancers and walking over an East River bridge from Manhattan to Queens. As the familiar urban skyline drops away behind her, trees, low buildings and an open sky come into view, a vista that could be in India as easily as in New York.
Other images cut in. Shots of a Bombay train station alternate with those of a New York subway. A woman laboriously prepares an Indian meal, then dashes out the door with a briefcase. The artist appears on the bridge, but also in a hospital. The film's soundtrack mixes crisp tabla drumbeats and the slow-paced tinkle of the ankle bells with bursts of street noise and jazz.
The result offers at least one version of what the texture of immigrant life might be: a mix of strangeness and familiarity, of intense involvement but also detachment. Above all, Ms. Hussain's unpretentious, evocative video suggests, joining is a process, part ceaseless movement, part meditation.
-Holland Cotter