The Letter, 2019
Fragmented Futures, Reflect Space
Los Angeles, California
Outliers, The Franklin
Chicago, USA
Like a familial artefact, this installation, based on an audio letter recorded on August 29, 1970 and sent by my mother's family in Kabul, Afghanistan to my parents in Jacksonville, Florida, provides an archival glimpse into a duality of ‘befores' - the before of coup d’etats and an ongoing war in Afghanistan and the before of his birth in February 1971. The letter was received while I was in my mother’s womb, present within my non-presence in the letter through a brief reference to my mother’s “condition” by my maternal grandfather; the grandfather who would come to name me Amanullah after the moderniser king Amanullah Khan.
Simultaneously, the quotidian, almost mundane, nature of the letter’s content serves as an unknowing prelude to what lay ahead, the same grandfather’s suicide coinciding with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - like the calm before the storm. Just as I was carelessly floating in amniotic fluid, before being born breached; forcefully birthed out of my mother and placed on the road towards an identity shaped by war and memories - those of my ancestors and those I had yet to make. Yet another calm before the storm. The letter is accompanied by another audio piece, inspired by several sessions of meditation where I allowed myself to be guided by the voices and stories in the recording. The result is a meditative piece, both calm and chaotic, that carries the listener into emotional and historical landscapes. The above mentioned historical moments are also symbolically present in this experimental audio at minute and second markers representing the dates of personal and/or political historical events - a birth, a suicide, an invasion.
Through its storytelling, the work speaks to lineage, place, memory, and belonging; stories known, stories unheard, and stories not yet lived. The archive as it is presented is therefore incomplete - with only fragments of the audio letter translated and transcribed, and not all family members who speak present in the photos on the wall. It’s as incomplete as most people’s memories of their past, and knowledge of their future. This intersection of time and space that both created, and was created by, the work is yet another attempt to try and understand the intricate connections that go into weaving the my lives (past, present, and future) together with the worlds they encompass.
Fragmented Futures, Reflect Space
Los Angeles, California
Outliers, The Franklin
Chicago, USA
Like a familial artefact, this installation, based on an audio letter recorded on August 29, 1970 and sent by my mother's family in Kabul, Afghanistan to my parents in Jacksonville, Florida, provides an archival glimpse into a duality of ‘befores' - the before of coup d’etats and an ongoing war in Afghanistan and the before of his birth in February 1971. The letter was received while I was in my mother’s womb, present within my non-presence in the letter through a brief reference to my mother’s “condition” by my maternal grandfather; the grandfather who would come to name me Amanullah after the moderniser king Amanullah Khan.
Simultaneously, the quotidian, almost mundane, nature of the letter’s content serves as an unknowing prelude to what lay ahead, the same grandfather’s suicide coinciding with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - like the calm before the storm. Just as I was carelessly floating in amniotic fluid, before being born breached; forcefully birthed out of my mother and placed on the road towards an identity shaped by war and memories - those of my ancestors and those I had yet to make. Yet another calm before the storm. The letter is accompanied by another audio piece, inspired by several sessions of meditation where I allowed myself to be guided by the voices and stories in the recording. The result is a meditative piece, both calm and chaotic, that carries the listener into emotional and historical landscapes. The above mentioned historical moments are also symbolically present in this experimental audio at minute and second markers representing the dates of personal and/or political historical events - a birth, a suicide, an invasion.
Through its storytelling, the work speaks to lineage, place, memory, and belonging; stories known, stories unheard, and stories not yet lived. The archive as it is presented is therefore incomplete - with only fragments of the audio letter translated and transcribed, and not all family members who speak present in the photos on the wall. It’s as incomplete as most people’s memories of their past, and knowledge of their future. This intersection of time and space that both created, and was created by, the work is yet another attempt to try and understand the intricate connections that go into weaving the my lives (past, present, and future) together with the worlds they encompass.
We Are Invisible Here, 2019
Diptychs:
The Song
The Horizon
The Processed
Still Frames/Video:
The Train
The Station
The Jetty
We Are Invisible Here, Slag Gallery, Solo Show
Brooklyn, NY, USA
Recognising the power of storytelling in forming our identities, communities, politics, and anxieties, in We Are Invisible Here, the migrant encampment the Jungle, in Calais, France, becomes a setting to challenge popular narratives of migration. With an official population count surpassing 8,000 migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East when French authorities destroyed it in October 2016, the Jungle had captured the attentions of political demagogues and media outlets that had reduced migrants to avatars of either criminality or suffering. Although it was and remains “an essential place” in the migration history of Europe, I leave migrants and refugees out of the works, instead looking closely at the site itself. Walls, fences, and other barriers guide migrants’ paths across Europe, and these structures form the distinct lines that comprise the works' compositions. The photos and videos of the in-between spaces demarked by these arbitrary obstacles capture the tension, hope, despair, and ambiguity experienced by the individuals that pass by or through them, disappearing into a society that, without the rights and agency of citizens, they experience as a dystopia.
For the three diptychs I have paired three photographs from Calais with three paintings created in reaction to each photo, each one informed by interviews with migrants I met in Paris. In the “The Horizon” (2019, photo, acrylic on canvas) a symmetrically composed photograph guides the viewer’s eye down a desolate path along a railroad until the path is abruptly severed by a fence. Its companion painting is constituted by the worn sole prints from sneakers that an Afghan migrant wore on two failed attempts to reach his wife in Germany. In “The Song” (2019, photo, acrylic on canvas), parallels are made between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979—a war resulting in the deaths of 163 of my family members—and the condition of Afghanistan 40 years later. A recent graffiti tag in a photo of empty Calais train tracks reads “See you in UK!”—evoking The Clash’s 1979 album, “London Calling,” a record that marked my youth. For its companion painting, “London Calling” is transliterated with stencilled bomb symbols in the colours of the album cover.
While the migrants within the works are either obscured or altogether missing from the sites featured in the diptychs and videos, they remain the gravity around which the narratives within the works form. The locations featured are the settings for the migration stories that political leaders and the media tell the public, but the settings for these simplistic and narrow narratives are only a template, a template fractured through these works, elevating the migrants’ humanity above the tropes that desensitise the public to the migrants’ experiences. These works exist as pathways into their lives that are not corrupted by paradigms of the migrants’ ostensible trespasses or miseries, nudging the viewer toward alterative narratives of the migrant and refugee experience.
