.png)
The Curation by Nour Hassan
The Curation, formerly Radical Contemporary, is a Digital Curator and Podcast based between Cairo, Dubai & Jeddah. We curate everything from art, fashion, and design, to culture, wellness and tech to present you with only the best brands, founders, products and pioneers.
The Curation by Nour Hassan
Ayesha Sultana and Sabih Ahmed: Fragility & Resilience at Ishara
In this episode our founder Nour Hassan is joined with Bangladeshi artist Ayesha Sultana, and Curator Sabih Ahmed, who is the Director of Ishara art Foundation, as they explore the exhibition "Fragility and Resilience" during a talk hosted at the Ishara Art Foundation.
Ayesha shares her experience of witnessing her art in a larger context, revealing new facets of her journey and the nuanced dance of body-environment interactions. Sabih provides a behind-the-scenes look at the thoughtful curatorial process, highlighting the importance of presenting a solo exhibition from a South Asian artist outside of India.
We take a closer look at the rich interplay between art, breath, and the environment, focusing on the concept of porosity. The conversation uncovers the layers of unfinished art, where the boundaries of inside and outside blur, and Ayesha's conscious decision to pause her Breath Count series during the pandemic.
We filmed the full talk for you to enjoy on YouTube and Instagram. Make sure you follow Ishara art Foundation for more exhibitions and future programming.
Ishara Art Foundation
Ishara Art Foundation was founded in 2019 as a non-profit organisation dedicated to presenting contemporary art of South Asia. Located in Dubai, the Foundation supports emerging and established practices that advance critical dialogue and explore global interconnections.
Ishara signifies a gesture, a signal or a hint, and is a word common to several languages including Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Bengali, Swahili and Urdu.
Ishara Art Foundation is presented in partnership with Alserkal.
For more information visit www.ishara.org.
Hello everyone, this is Noor Hassan and you're listening to the Ishara Art Foundation and Radical Contemporary season. This is the third episode of the season, which includes a full interview with Smita Prabhakar, the founder of Ishara Art Foundation. In this episode, you will be listening to the full talk and conversation with Aisha Sultana, the incredible artist behind Fragility and Resilience, the exhibition at Ishara Art Foundation at the moment, as well as Sabih Ahmed, who is the amazing curator behind the exhibition, as well as the director of Ishara Art Foundation. We are very excited to present to you the full talk, as well as the incredible questions from the audience at the end.
Speaker 1:This talk was one of the most informative on South Asia art that I have personally moderated and attended. There are so many gems in this conversation. We speak about Aisha's practice, sabih's curatorial process, as well as Ishara Art Foundation's ethos and vision for promoting South Asian art in the region and beyond. So, without further ado, you will hear a brief introduction from Marzia Rashid, who is part of the Ishara Art Foundation team, followed by the talk moderated by myself with Aisha Sultana and Sabih Ahmed.
Speaker 2:I'm so excited to welcome you to an artist talk with Aisha Sultana, who is at the center of our current exhibition, Fragility and Resilience, hosted by Noor Hassan, who is an award-winning journalist as well as a cultural influencer and a curator and a podcast host. She's the founder of the Radical Contemporary podcast, where she has interviewed over 100 cultural personalities in the Middle East, including Antonia Carver and Hala Khayat and Buthaina Kazim, as well as our own founder, Smita Prabhakar, and now Aisha. The episode is actually going to air. Sorry, this talk is actually going to air as an episode of the podcast, so make sure that you check that out.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much, marzia. Thank you for that beautiful introduction. Thank you very much, marzia. Thank you for that beautiful introduction. I'm really honestly honored to be here with all of you today and mainly I'm grateful that we got to meet yesterday, because I just felt that having the experience of the show with you was the most special experience for me. I want to start by just getting your insights, aisha, on how you felt seeing your work presented at Ishaura and how that gave you sort of a different perspective on your own work, even just seeing you walk through the exhibition yourself yesterday hi everyone, thank you for being here.
Speaker 4:so thank you for your question. It was my first time seeing the show in person yesterday and I think just you know having the opportunity to present my work at Ishara has been very meaningful and exciting, thank you. So you asked me how I view my work like after seeing the show.
Speaker 3:Yes, the show in specific. Yes, how did you feel yesterday seeing the work presented as it was in Ishoto? Because we went through it together and you had a lot of comments. I'd love for you to share how you enjoyed it being installed, etc.
Speaker 4:Yeah, definitely this opportunity has given me some time to also reflect on ideas that I'd been exploring. But it was interesting to see those connections that underpin my practice, whether it has to do with the interaction of the body with its environment and its relationships. So it was interesting to see my work in a different light because I think it was the first time my work was shown in a larger space, with various types of work presented like older and newer bodies of work, various types of work presented like older and newer bodies of work. So I think, um, working with sabi, like through this curatorial practice, was also very interesting because, um, you know, there were connections made in the show that I hadn't sort of um figured out myself, yeah, while making the works even like, even if it's over a period of many years. So I think just making those connections, drawing on those connections after seeing the show, was really special, especially in the first room where you see the photographs punctuating the scratch drawings.
Speaker 3:Yes, I think that was a really powerful choice and I want to take it to Sabih. How was the experience of curating this exhibition with Aisha Sultano, and you named it Fragility and Resilience, which I think is a very poignant name and also very timely. I'd love for you to share more about the curatorial process that you took with Aisha.
Speaker 5:Thank you, duran, thank you everyone for joining us. I know with many of you we've had conversations about exhibitions that we've held at Ashar in the past. Some of you, in fact, have been interlocutors for public talks like these as well as well and I must say that presenting a solo of Ayesha Sultanaz was very special for us for many, many reasons. To start off with, it's the first solo exhibition we've done of an artist from South Asia who's not from India. So it's a low bar, but it was an important bar to cross and we're very happy and privileged to have the chance of beginning this kind of opening up with Aisha. We've had group exhibitions where we're trying to complicate geographies and even have artists from the diaspora as well as artists not from South Asia but closely in conversation with South Asian contexts or histories. With Aisha's I've been following her work and strangely your work is kind, where everyone feels like they've seen your work but also, at the same time, not quite figured it out, and I think one of the reasons for that is because we see so many bits and pieces everywhere you don't really see it congeal. So when you see a practice come together in a slightly more holistic and ambitious way. Certainly this never attempted to be a survey, so we knew we weren't going to do a survey. We also knew we're not going to do a top picks of everything that you should see and know about Aisha, but rather a specific kind of reading of Aisha's practice. That just to quickly answer now your question directly. It was to say that I mean we received a PDF from Ayesha's studio of almost 1,000 pages. We were like, I mean, ayesha is a prolific artist and we were like how do we even start? Like where do you even begin? And I mean there's a diversity of mediums. There is somewhat a kind of a radius of concerns that aisha keeps revisiting, which is beautiful. But one thing we me and my colleagues marzia priyanka, mary grace and all of us we always sit together in the team and brainstorm how we feel about people's practices that we're engaging with.
Speaker 5:And we found something very beautiful of looking at a practice which deals with abstraction and if anyone knows me and I've said this before also I personally have a beef with abstraction. So to engage with a practice that is so generally so committed to a certain kind of abstraction was intriguing for me. And as we spent more and more time with her work, we realized that there's something very special going on, because this is somewhat of a bodily abstraction, an abstraction that is visceral or corporeal, is to do with sensations, like the breath, or like with memory, or like with skin and touch, or like, basically, how the body and its pores absorb or release Right, and so, in that sense, it became a process where we were looking at an exhibition about the body without the figure, and that became a really nice starting point of bringing together works, the breath count series, which is actually right here behind us. Those scratches are actually about keeping a count or diary of a breath. It's about the body and yet there's no figure in it.
Speaker 5:And so, similarly, all of these sort of started coming together because we spend time with it. And then, in conversations with Aisha it's a word that actually my colleagues always make fun of because we've used it so often it was a very intuitive process. Usually, as a team, we're quite cerebral Okay, how does this work? How does this conceptually kind of come together? But there was a lot of intuitive guidance that I think, working with Aisha, we were invited into and that's what finally, I think, brought this show together.
Speaker 3:This doesn't answer the process, but I'm sure we'll come to that is really impactful and how subtle and, and how beautifully you do utilize abstraction to convey bodily functions, such as in the works of breath, count and pools, and I'd love for you to just share with us more your artistic process, your creative process in the utilization of abstraction. Um, and and what is the thought process behind? For example, breath counts, as you described it to me yesterday with each piece? I don't remember what I said. Well, I think that it was just very interesting to me. Yeah, each piece is different and how it traversed those liminal lines. When we went through COVID and the breath was something we thought about a lot for several months at least.
Speaker 4:So I think, when I think about abstraction in my own practice, I find it like it's not confined to literal representation. When I'm thinking about into literal representation, when I'm thinking about somehow manifesting bodily experiences through the work, because for me the body is like a complex and layered site. When I'm talking about the body, I'm talking from my own experience, lived experience. So, yes, it's something that's both familiar and unknowable at the same time. Um. So abstraction for me mirrors that duality. Um, for instance, in the breath count series. Um, yeah, it's a um, it's a like a visual diary, or where you see the rhythm of how something as intangible as air or time is kind of manifested in a tangible presence through these mark makings. Similarly, also in the glass sculptures, pools, you see, these, you know sort of I don't know, I wouldn't say meditative, but these but they were.
Speaker 4:they're very meditative actually, and yes, accumulation, which could also evoke like bodily secretions or evil of some sort. Yeah, so I think for me, abstraction in that way distills, I'm able to engage with it in a more I don't know intuitive manner. When it comes to drawing, especially where, yeah, it's more.
Speaker 3:I think the pools. In specific. I want Sabih to comment on this more, but you chose to give this exhibition three distinct sections and I want to know what was the thought process behind that? Because, as you said at the beginning, this is a very big repertoire of work from Aisha's work and there are several different mediums utilized. So why did you choose to present them in three different sections? And, as we went through yesterday, each section has a feel, a vibe and a completely different energy for the viewer. So can you take us a little bit through the actual viewer experience?
Speaker 5:actual your experience. Thank you, as Aisha mentioned, actually I must compliment you. You put it very beautifully about how our bodies are familiar to us and yet completely unknowable, and I think that's something about even trying to enter your practice You're entering something that's familiar and yet you're not quite sure whether you get it, whether you know where it's coming from or where it's taking you. So in that kind of realm, when we were putting together the exhibition, we started looking at works and actually, while it looks like a comprehensive exhibition, it's only got nine bodies of works. It's only nine works in the show but together combined, all the pieces amount, like count, to about 138 or 140 or something. So you get to see an artist practice where work is not a small set of compositions but actually an ongoing series, like breath count has been going on since 2018, right, six years, so it's a six years in continuity and that is one work just going, kind of like one's breath.
Speaker 5:So the three sections of the show, um, started with breathing, but looking at breathing in a much more expanded sense, that breathing is actually about porosity, that as we breathe, we take the environment in and we we we realize that relationship of porosity but also a kind of um, I don't want to say disobedience of borders or boundaries, but basically a disregard for borders or boundaries.
Speaker 5:We felt that during COVID, because everyone had to create the border of the mosque, right, so you can really see the pervasiveness of breath. So the first section was about breath, but also porosity, porosity with the environment, with each other, and so there's the breath count interspersed with the threshold series, which are those photographs that you see interspersed between them, which kind of also is about a memory of one person, of a daughter with her father, which is shared, and a kind of inscription onto the work. So it's about these shared kind of spaces where borders are blurry in a sense, and the breath does that. It actually creates a blurry border between the outside and the inside. You know, in Renaissance and all of these kinds of movements, you used to hear that eyes are the windows to the soul, right, but in a way, maybe the breath is also a window to the soul and in a way also, then, when you think about it, when someone's gone, the breath leaves the body, right.
Speaker 4:So this Metaphor for living.
Speaker 5:It's a metaphor for life, exactly. So the first section was the breath, the second was actually surfaces and skins.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 5:Because the tissue works. I mean we have this one, the miasm series and the works that were in this gallery on Japanese silk tissue. You can see that the tissue is something that comes into contact with the skin. The skin usually becomes the contour of our body also. It is the one space that sort of creates a silhouette or divides the inside with the outside, and that skin, in Aisha's practice, is again rendered porous in a way. It is a skin that oozes, that absorbs, that secretes, as you said.
Speaker 5:So the second section became about that, about surfaces, but again a disregard for borders vis-a-vis those surfaces. And then up here it was kind of an anatomy of of aisha's studio and practice. So the tools, instruments, sometimes what aisha called the garbage from her studio, got shared with us. We deconstructed one of her graphite on paperworks that you see on on this side, which actually have circulated around the world, and so this became more like a space of just understanding her process and not necessarily a continuity of the themes downstairs, just to give you an idea of that. And this space was curated actually by my colleagues, marzi and Priyanka, putting that together here.
Speaker 3:Yes, yesterday, marzi and Priyanka. Thank you for curating this space. It was beautiful to see the pieces from your studio. Aisha, I do want to touch on the idea of the unfinished. It was very interesting that you shared yesterday that you do view some of your pieces still, even as exhibited, as unfinished, and especially as such an established artist, I'd love for you to talk to us a little bit more about how you look at a piece and think that there could be more to it and that there are several iterations that could come out of it still, even after it's been exhibited, even maybe in the future. Can you talk us through that thought process? I thought it was fascinating.
Speaker 4:I thought it was fascinating. Yeah, I think the process of making is definitely an integral part of the work, Because I feel like that's just as important as the final piece itself, Because each work also through the process, each work has its own story to unfold, Even if it's individual pieces from the same series. When do I think the work is resolved? That's actually a very daunting question because it really depends. For example, yesterday, the works that I pointed out saying that okay, this needs to go back to the studio and I need to spend more time thinking through. It was more. I was thinking about the technical aspect of the work.
Speaker 5:I don't know about this.
Speaker 3:Yes, we had a Unfinished work, yes, unfinished. And the word you used was resolved, I think, and it was a really interesting actually use of language there, because you didn't say unfinished. You said I don't feel this piece is resolved. But why do you think so? When you look at it, when you look at a piece, for example, of yours, is it an, is it an emotional reaction or sort of a technical?
Speaker 4:yeah, I mean for the pieces downstairs. It was technical, um, interesting sometimes, when I'm also also like working on a body of work, you know, over a prolonged period of time. It could be something more conceptual or something I'm trying to, like you know, excavate through, you know, these acts of repetition and gestures.
Speaker 5:Can I ask one question, sure, which is that, like the Breath Count series since it started in 2018, will it just go on, or will there be a point where you might be like, okay, maybe I should put a stop to it?
Speaker 4:I'm actually planning to pause and wrap it up soon, like by this year.
Speaker 5:So I've been working on, like the last drawings from the series um back in my studio, and what makes you decide that? Is there some moment that you felt, okay, I think this work has done what it needed to do?
Speaker 4:yeah, I think, um, I think so because I feel like the mark making of the from. When I look at the mark making from this series I mean, there are, I think, over 300 from this series or more, maybe more or less so I feel like the mark making became also more and more loose and more gestural and, yeah, it just felt like also more sparse in a way. So I felt like, you know, it was sort of like coming to some kind of end of a cycle. Maybe it's the visuals I was creating subconsciously.
Speaker 3:It's interesting yesterday you mentioned that the Breathwork series, I believe, was something that you paused during COVID, correct? Because you didn't want it to be sort of I forgot exactly, but I think an exploitation of what was going on at the time, or something of the sort, which I think is really fascinating regarding your process, your creative process in general, and how, for you, even though this must have been a very poignant time for the Breathwork series you chose to take a pause. Can you share more about why you thought that was important?
Speaker 4:For this particular series. I wasn't making these drawings consistently over the last six years. There were, you know, um points where I would pause for a while and especially I like this series was started like a year and a half before the pandemic and after the pandemic like I felt, like you know, I needed to like take a break from it because sort of when you start talking about something that's happening like everybody's experiencing and then sort of exhibiting that and monetizing that, it just didn't make sense to me Interesting.
Speaker 3:And Sabih, I'd love for you to tell us a little bit more about why you felt this was the perfect time or the opportune time to have the solo, the first solo exhibition for Aisha Sultana's work at Ishaura Art Foundation. It touches on so many you know social, social commentary, bodily commentary, um so many important topics and I would love to know, um just as a foundation, how you felt it was important. Like you said, the first artist South Asia that is from Bangladesh solo exhibition and it's a very, very powerful exhibition as well. So please tell us more.
Speaker 5:Thank you About the timing. I can't say it's perfect timing. In fact, I believe generally art is best when it's untimely, in that it comes when you least expect it and tells you something. It opens something for you when you least expect to be addressing that, because everyone else is talking about exactly one thing, and then maybe the way an art practice may open up a question would make you look at those same things differently. Would make you look at those same things differently.
Speaker 5:It did feel like a show such as this was coming, because back in 2021, we had invited this wonderful photographer and probably a common friend of many here, saurabh Gura, to curate this exhibition called Growing Like a Tree, and one of the invitations in that I mean generally, when we're inviting artists or curators, we share a process of like sending prompts. How would they respond? Not like we'd like this work, can we show this? It's like you know, we've been thinking about these, these things. When we see your work, what do you think? And then they send yeah, actually, then they respond in that way. So, with Saurabh, we were talking about how it's never just about his photography and his practice. It's also about the conversations he's having with so many other people and he's often traveling a lot and meeting a lot of young artists and young photographers, including visiting Bangladesh regularly and meeting many common friends. And so the phrase fragility and resilience actually first came in our conversations in Saurabh's show, because we were looking at how, despite COVID and despite lockdowns, very fragile connections and networks seem to be so resilient because people were able to support each other. Artists were supporting each other in the most unusual and beautiful kind of ways, while institutions were unable to, because you can't send out funding in this time or you can't prepare for visas and things like that right. So in fact, a very fragile network got activated between artists that in fact proved much more resilient than the monolithic kind of institutions. And so he created this beautiful drawing with lots of lines. You can actually find it in one of the booklets downstairs. It's called Growing Like a Tree, and so that conversation stayed with us, and we know that even COVID is staying with us.
Speaker 5:Everything that has happened in terms of the vulnerabilities, the losses that everyone's experienced, it just still feels very real. It still feels like we're still going through it, and so in that kind of realm, we felt we want to do something, and which artists are actually talking about these things without making them topical, right. That's when conversations with even Aisha were going on. It felt, you know, here's someone who's talking about a breath count series or pools or miasms and trying to talk about vulnerability without being topical about it, without being literal about it, yes, and talking about it as a shared experience. So that's what made it feel like, okay, maybe now we can sort of start processing something and have some conversation through an artist practice. So, in fact, it's kind of delayed. It could have happened in 2021 or 2022. Fact it's kind of delayed, it could have happened in 2021 or 2022, but then it would have just felt, like Aisha said, as if it's topical.
Speaker 3:Okay, we should make do an exhibition about breathing, because COVID makes breathing very difficult, or something like that yes, I think it's interesting and I want to go in with Aisha a little bit more before we have our our last couple of questions about the diversity and variety of mediums that you use in your work. There are so many different choices out there, but I think that for every piece, you really select the perfect medium to convey what we need to feel, and I think everyone interprets them differently, but essentially, the glass for me, I felt, honestly, for me, I felt it was so poignant to have use your own breath to create the sculptures and this is something that is really alive. So, and then, of course, there's the etching, the mark making the acrylic, the tissues, tissues which I thought was actually a material like a sort of cloth fabric, but you told me yesterday in a closer look, no, it's actually tissue paper. So can you tell me how it is you go about selecting these materials and exploring the practices in general, these materials and exploring the practices?
Speaker 4:in general, I don't think there's any right or wrong material, but I think sometimes I'm just I tend to work on simultaneous projects in the studios and I have like different types of objects and even, like, when it comes to paper, I have like different types of paper that I work with. So I feel like sometimes the concept just kind of clicks with the medium. It really depends. I mean, there's glass sculptures. It's something that was on my mind for a couple of years, but I had initially also imagined them to be like suspended work, not something that would be laid on the floor or on a like a plinth right platform. Um, so it really like depends.
Speaker 4:Um, I think it's through a process of like trial and error and, um, I mean process of failure, and there's so much moments of uncertainty in the studio too. So, um, I'm definitely drawn to like a lot of like textured tactile materials, things that I can also work with with my own hands. I enjoy that a lot. So, um, the video that was actually running in this on this floor yes, there is a video on the mezzanine that kind of gives an insight into that now that I'm looking at the work 15 years after it was made. So I think that's been interesting to kind of also reflect on that, like the choice of medium in relation to what I was looking at 15 years ago.
Speaker 5:Can I add something about medium, because this is a conversation that Aisha and I had, because there's a very specific choice of materials and mediums that comes in and very well researched, like the kind of material you come across in Aisha's practice. I've never come across clay-coated paper before and that too, black clay-coated paper I never knew it existed and a lot of friends I've given tours to never knew, couldn't figure it existed, and a lot of friends I've given tours to never knew, couldn't figure it out. Or this Japanese silk tissue downstairs on which there are these watercolor pigments that congeal. Never seen a medium like that before. Or even a work that a lot of people are familiar with, which are these graphite rubbings on paper that we've kind of deconstructed on this panel on the left.
Speaker 5:And what we discovered in conversations with aisha was that there's a kind of material ambivalence that she seems to, seems to gravitate towards I'm sorry I'm speaking almost like like you're not here right now, sorry, but um, there's a kind of material ambivalence and this to us, was really uh, compelling, because otherwise there's a kind of material literalness and materiality being spoken about as like if I want to talk about a wooden sculpture that looks like this I actually praise and appreciate the woodness, the woody effect of it.
Speaker 5:So the material seems to carry a sense of truth in a sculpture that the materiality of a work is the truth of the work, the inner core essence of the work hers totally inver. Core essence of the work, hers totally inverts. That Hers is you think you're looking at a metal sheet? It's a piece of paper with graphite rubbed on it. You think you're looking at a fabric, but it's actually silk tissue. It's tissue, it's paper. So this kind of rejection of materiality as a site of truths about a work and rather keeping materiality ambivalent, seemed very compelling and it made me start looking at other works where material ambivalence is being exercised or explored rather than material literalness.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Saviha, and thank you, Aisha, for giving us a little bit more perspective. I want to know how it felt to see the nitty gritty insides of your workshop and your space being displayed here. You can all view it in the back the different materials, your tools, curated beautifully by Priyanka and Marzia. How did that feel, seeing your tools?
Speaker 4:I think initially, when Savi proposed this idea, I was a little hesitant because even though I, you know, like to discuss or talk about the process of making, I hadn't shown my work, like any like elements like that in the studio, whether it's like, yeah, it's a material, objects or tools or different types of paper, or even unfinished work, discarded pieces from the studio. So I was a bit hesitant. It was it did feel like to be in a kind of vulnerable state, but I think very personal. But I think, like you know, after showing up here and kind of experiencing the space um in person, I think it works beautifully because you also kind of catch a glimpse of of different types of process. So so I think Marzia and Priyanka has done justice to how I mean the idea was initially conceived as well by Sabi.
Speaker 3:Yeah, amazing. So we've gone quite deep and in detail with fragility and resilience and how the curation was done and also the materiality of your work. I'd love to know from the both of you if you were to give advice for emerging South Asian artists on how to make truly an impact on the international art scene. I mean, isha, your work has been in Lahore Biennales and Queensland, all over the world and now the GCC solo exhibition here at Ishwara Art Foundation. If you have any advice, any words as an artist and as a curator, I'll let you go first.
Speaker 4:If you'd like to, let me know, and also I'm sure our audience would love to hear it um, yeah, it's been a privilege getting the opportunity to show my work in lahore and queensland, as you mentioned, as well as here at ishara art foundation. Um, I mean, the art world, even for me, can be quite daunting and overwhelming at times because of all these kind of external expectations and trends.
Speaker 4:So I think it's I think for everyone I think it's important to um kind of hone in your craft and find your voice. I think that's really important, like focus on what truly matters to you, um and uh, yeah, I think that's all I have to.
Speaker 3:As an artist, okay, and Savia as the curator, how do you think? Of course, ishara is leading the way in really spotlighting South Asian artists, but what do you think is expected of the artist, or how should the artist navigate?
Speaker 5:It'd be terrible for me to advise what artists should do, but I worked in an archive before where we used to digitize artist's archive, and I've done that work for 10 years. It was in an organization called Asia Art Archive.
Speaker 5:Of course, yeah, and so there a lot of artists would come to me, both young, old, mid-career and they'd be like you know, we want to archive our studios and our practice as well. What should we do? Tell us a template and stuff. And I used to be like initially, I used to give them templates and I realized I'm doing the wrong thing, so I would tell them actually you should do things that should challenge us as archivists Like you should not follow a template. It should make our life harder, because that's what we're looking for. You should be challenging the archive, the Excel sheet, the templates, the exhibition space. It has to start there.
Speaker 5:So your starting point is actually not how to adapt to my system, not to adapt to any existing system, but see where you want to go. Now, I know that sounds like very abstract advice, because you can go into the middle of the forest and just be lost, right so? But I mean it's always there's some level of relation and being in a milieu and responding to institutional expectations. So I think, instead of trying to adapt and just mold oneself into some kind of a template, in fact, I think what every curator or thinker or even visitors are excited by is when something's breaking the mold. So to actually not try to conform but pursue the questions you're asking. So that's one, to not necessarily conform to institutional templates.
Speaker 5:Second, finding good mentors and role models. Even if they don't know that you take them as role models. I think that's nice because you study people's practice that way. And finally, being just very rigorous and not keeping a low standard for yourself. I mean, there's just so much information available, so I mean I just listen to talks online of artists and look up to their work or curators, and they don't even know I'm big admirers of their work and stuff and I'm studying it. So I think I see many artists doing the same thing. They're really studying their contemporaries, their peers, and seeing their work in relation to each other's. I think the hermetic artist idea um, while it was very romantic and there is something very precious about going into your inner space and safe space to make stuff, I think, finally, artists who are most celebrated artists who are also having great conversations in whichever language, in whichever settings, in dry states, in fluid states, in any states. So it's really about keeping the conversations going.
Speaker 3:Yes, I think, community storytelling interviews. I know that, Aisha, thank you for doing this interview. I know that you don't do this often, so we're really honored that you agreed and that you're here today.
Speaker 5:Freddie Mercury never did an interview.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:People would just be running after Freddie Mercury. Please give us an interview. For years nothing.
Speaker 3:So we appreciate it truly, and so we'd love to know what to look forward to next, what you're working on now, if you can share with us.
Speaker 4:Thank you, Noor. Actually, at the moment I'm working towards a couple of crew presentations, exhibitions. I'm also interested in exploring different new ideas that I have gestating in the studio which is not sort of processed, going through like a new process in my mind right now, Also kind of working with new kinds of medium that I haven't really dabbled with. Can you share, you mean, in terms of media? Clay is one medium like clay and also glass.
Speaker 3:Glass is something that I would also like to keep exploring for myself a situation where we have her here now to answer, so please go ahead. If anyone has any questions about fragility and resilience and Aisha's work, of course, and for Sabih as the curator, we have a question here.
Speaker 6:I have two questions I hope not too long, I'll keep them short. One for Sabi, which is I'd be interested to know what your ambivalence is usually towards abstraction you said that in the beginning and what this show then made you kind of rethink. I think you touched on it briefly Sort of idea of tangible and intangible, but just a bit more. And secondly for you, aisha, I know that you often get placed within this sort of lineage of, say, south Asian women, abstractionists and all the other people that kind of are in that sort of bracket of whether it's Lala, sahar, nasreen, and I just wanted to know how you felt about that, if you felt any of those reference points were at all interesting, or if you were looking elsewhere or not at all.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the reference that you mentioned has been brought up quite a lot, I think in recent years. The artist you mentioned, nasreen Mohammadi, somebody that I feel, like you know, has influenced me, like when I first encountered her work more than 10 years ago, it really like had a deep impact. So I felt a great resonance, like with her practice, especially her drawings. Like with her practice, especially her drawings. And you also mentioned Lala Rook and Seher. I mean, seher is a contemporary artist, both artists that I deeply admire.
Speaker 4:But I'm not sure when it comes to influence. I mean, yeah, I wouldn't, okay, no, because I have. I don't like to be like vision hole, like that, Like right now, if I'm just making work which is more like kind of like fluid or with like not monochromatic, for instance, maybe it would be something else like. So I think I'm, I try to like um, not have that in my mind, um, but it's there. It's been something that you know I've heard people discuss and talk about too, so, but I'm not really comfortable with it um, but just to pick up on jyoti's question um, do you see yourself in in conversation with certain practices?
Speaker 5:I mean your conversation, and are any of those artists that jyoti mentioned one of them? Because people start, people are hearing conversations between certain practices. Are you having those conversations or are you having conversations with other practices that we're actually not even aware and seeing?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, recently I was actually thinking about the practice of Taiba Begumlipi and her explorations of the body and identity, and also like personal family history. So I think that has been like um, like I would say, yeah, definitely, because even though like visually it's, it could be different, like for, from a formal standpoint, but I feel like she's definitely influenced me over the years because she's also been like a guide, um, you know, I closely worked with her, uh, when I was at vritto for many years, um, so yeah, so I think in recent times I've been thinking about her practice more and more done shall I is.
Speaker 5:Does that answer your question, jyoti? Yeah, okay, uh, to, just to respond to jyoti's question, to me it's threefold. My not even ambivalence. My beef with abstraction um is and I know it's polemical but I'm I'm going with it which is one it's often justified like to justify the value of abstraction, you have to keep referring back to the genealogy of abstraction, and usually that genealogy is Western abstraction, so Western art history. So somewhere or the other, some of those, the canonical names from Western art history are going to come in, why this is relevant and how this reminds you of either Mark Rothko or the constructivists, or the Soviet, also the suprematists or any of these kinds of things. So it keeps referring back to some canonical justification.
Speaker 5:On the inverse of that, it also finds its roots in a kind of Orientalist discourse of an abstraction which is not iconophilic and therefore arabesque and calligraphic abstraction. So you go into these civilizational tropes on one hand, or these kind of Western art history canonical tropes on the other hand, and of course, the Orientalist. It's not just a projection. There is a huge artistic kind of heritage in looking at geometry, both in a theological sense, in a political sense and in an art historical sense. But, like I said, I'm being polemical. And the third factor in this is the kind of abstraction that we are pushed into today with data abstraction, so everything being abstracted into data visualizations, patterns, things like that. I mean, whether the food we eat is what kind of calories they're coming with that calorie count and the kind of proteins going in, of course they're important. But all of those are within some kind of a new regime of abstraction which is not anti-representation as Western art history would have had it initially. It's in fact hyper-representational, indexical, that in fact I will convert your body into a series of ingredients. We were in this workshop yesterday where someone actually asked us to kind of list down the ingredients of an artwork and how many of those ingredients are harmful for the environment, and it felt strangely prescriptive, like this kind of diagnostic thing going on. Have you done that with big institutions, like, have you asked them to make an ingredient list than, like, just asking the artists, you know? So it's kind of this. So this abstraction of the body, of all of these things going into a data abstraction, that regime, so that's the other end of the spectrum. So that's my beef with all of these, and so to me it seems to work on all kinds of dichotomies and binaries which I don't find constructive, and that's why I mean I engage with practices that are not starting with.
Speaker 5:Okay, this is abstract, that's why it's relevant. What is it doing? So a nasreen muhammadi who actually held on to a certain kind of geometric abstraction, was going into some kind of a transcendental space and through through a kind of uh, through certain capacities which would sometimes not even allow them to go there, and so it takes you somewhere else which is not justifying abstraction, based on Agnes Martin, necessarily, or something like that, right? So that's my beef with abstraction. So I don't obviously start in with that. That being said, we have scholars here. We have Suheila and a bunch of friends who've, in fact, suheila takish very kindly accepted to write, uh, a short essay on on um aisha, and she's a scholar, an art historian, who's actually worked along arab art histories, where there is an important case to be made for some of those languages. So so I'm just being polemical, like I said, but I hold that polemics close and therefore it reflects in the choices I make and in the curations I do. I hope that answers you know, okay, do we have any other questions, do we?
Speaker 7:have any other questions. I really enjoyed when I first saw your show. We went, we swerved, and that's something that I really want to understand better the notion of the swerve in terms of historical time, which Sabi told me about. So I guess this is mostly for you, sabi, um, but also I realized that when I saw the, the glass, uh, the dialectic tension that it um offered was compared to that of teardrops, and the swerving and the mourning I found to be particularly, uh, poignant as as a kind of cathartic notion itself.
Speaker 7:But this was me projecting my own need for self-help. But also it was an immersive experience of how you dealt with something productively, particularly with how gentle you were with the clay, coated paper, um, and and and for that, like you demonstrated political agency, um, you took hold of yourself and you went like I don't know, it was very powerful in that sense because you were also simultaneously very gentle and you weren't, I don't know, um, it wasn't explosive, it was like this controlled diffusion, if that makes sense. But yeah, I sort of wanted to also ask about the process of mourning and how I projected the teardrops onto the cubic structure. And, sabi, of course, please tell me what swerving means in historical time and Sabi, of course.
Speaker 5:Please tell me what swerving means in historical time.
Speaker 4:Warby, does mourning connect with any of the works you're doing? Yeah, so ideas of loss and grief is definitely there. But when I was actually, I was telling sabi uh recently that, um, I was going through some of my sketchbooks during my like, first and second pregnancies, um, I was going through the pages and it was just filled with images of oval shapes. So, so I feel like subconsciously it was there in my mind, like thinking about the fetus or like this multiplying organism or some cell in the body. So, yeah, I think I would say that was like the initial idea behind the pools, sculptures that you see downstairs, but they can be perceived in so many ways.
Speaker 4:I feel like that's another reason why I don't talk too much about the work, because you can it's subjective, right you can have your own meanings, draw your own meanings from the work. They could be thought bubbles, they could be, you know, pools of water, they could be the organ in your body of water. There could be an organ in your body, imprints of frets, yeah, so I think it's multiple ways of reading it.
Speaker 5:Are there any works ever where you would like it to be read in a certain way Because it meant something so specific to you?
Speaker 4:I mean breath count is pretty. I mean, when I speak about breath counts, it's pretty obvious. Yeah, even if it's like a two or three line. You know two or three line sentence. So I think it's and connect to it more, since the pandemic.
Speaker 5:To the Swerve question. Let's take it outside.
Speaker 3:All right guys. A couple of more questions. We have time. We have a little bit of time.
Speaker 8:Amazing. Hi ayesha, I know you have touched upon the question of the materiality of the glass, and how do you not consciously make a choice of a material while making the artwork? But the glass is something, the glass sculpture which I saw yesterday, that was the one artwork which completely sort of strikes you immediately and it creates a sort of synonymity with the skin, with the physiognomy of the body how the feeble the body is, fragile the body is. Once it breaks, it has its wounds and similarly we can find those parallel between once the glass breaks. So I just wanted to, you know, out of curiosity, wanted to ask you uh, how did you make a choice of having this glass as a sculpture material for this kind of work, what you're talking about?
Speaker 4:if you could just touch upon that, thank you um, I think when I was in conversation with sabi for this exhibition, I was already kind kind of slowly developing this body of work with class. But this idea has been there in my mind for a couple of years at least but I didn't get the maybe chance or yeah, there's this also fear of working with sculptural material in my practice, like I used to flunk my sculpture classes at Beacon House. So I think that kind of lingered on for many years. So it's something that I was thinking of exploring.
Speaker 4:Like I had done a little bit of that when I lived in Dhaka, but it wasn't like dealing with glass blowing techniques. It was more like buying industrial material, you know sheets, and kind of making different compositions with that, which was sort of referencing the city as inspiration. And how did I? I mean it took a few months to sort of figure out the forms I was thinking about like an anchor in the show, like in the first place, I think I was more convinced of following through with the glass sculptures Because it made a connection which was I would have never thought flunking in art school would have such a long ongoing impact that even to this day you worry about sculptures.
Speaker 5:But I should add one thing which I think over the past couple of years, interacting with more and more artists and now with this exhibition, interacting with Aisha, was a real revelation for me. So Aisha studied in Beacon House in Lahore in Pakistan, and I've studied in art history and culture studies in India In some of the schools art schools which are very celebrated and revered, that they're very important art schools since the 1950s onwards right, I mean there is a strong legacy of art schools, art education in South Asia generally. Some of it takes from colonialism but there are also projects and schools like Shantiniketan, which are resisting the colonial syllabus and developing something of their own. So one knows the history of art schools in South Asia through some key universities and colleges and for the longest time some of those colleges and universities have been located in India, such as Shantiniketan, which is one of those examples that resisted colonial education system, or Baroda, which is in Western India, which has been an important art school.
Speaker 5:And what I realized was that actually the number of artists from the rest of South Asia that have studied in Beacon House in Lahore, and how important that school has been, and some of the teachers there, who are also prominent artists like Salimah Hashmi, rashid Rana, imran Qureshi, so many. So maybe you could share a little bit about your experience in Beacon House, and I think, for those of us who are interested in looking at the history of art education and art schools, beacon house really comes on the map in a very important way for, like, at least the past two decades 2020 onwards, perhaps even longer. So maybe you could share a little bit about your experience in beacon house, what you studied there, who were the teachers that shaped some of your sensibilities, and how it still continues to traumatize you as well.
Speaker 5:I don't know, I don't know I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I didn't. I don't know, I don't. Yeah, I think when I went to Lahore to study fine arts, it was initially like a year-long plan because it was just for the foundation studies. It was a South Asian scholarship program, asian scholarship program, and before that, like you know, I hadn't really considered art as something that I could sort of pursue professionally. I think that idea sort of came about much later, maybe even after my graduation. Like there was a period where, you know, I was still trying to figure it out, but it was definitely.
Speaker 4:We were the first batch in the fine arts program and it was a very nurturing and dynamic environment to be in, because some of my teachers were, I mean, they were practitioners and they were teaching at the same time and I felt like there was no kind of hierarchy of this sort of student-teacher relationship. I think that was really special. So there was Salimah Hashmi, she was the dean at the time. There was Julia Ahmed, she was my art history professor, and Huma Mulji and Rashid Rana and, yeah, it was an interdisciplinary course for four years. It's yeah, it's definitely influenced my approach to art making, yeah, my approach to drawing.
Speaker 5:They have drawing classes. Did life studies, life studies painting.
Speaker 4:Yeah, they were electives yeah, they were electives, whether it was structural drawing, whether it was like a study in motion with the human body. So there were yeah, there were different electives that you could take.
Speaker 5:But why I brought that up is also because in a lot of the education system that once I started following this a little closer, I realized there was also attention being given to miniature painting traditions. So you're actually looking at techniques that come from way long ago which actually require craftsmanship, which otherwise modern art education kind of wants to keep out. You want to be unruly, you want to be not into traditional techniques. So in at least some, both National College of Art in Pakistan and Beacon House, there was an embracing of okay, we're going to actually talk about border and margin paintings of Hashiyas, the paper that you choose for painting, and sometimes really studying very closely the handmade papers and rice papers and looking at compositions of a miniature painting. So some of these things were also, I believe, part of the syllabus Fed with the work subconsciously yeah, I mean even.
Speaker 3:We didn't touch on. Well, you're not a self-proclaimed feminist artist, but there are many sort of elements in your work that do pertain to feminist art traditions. So do you have any feminist artists that you do look up to or enjoy? Because it is um, it is sort of a theme that I I personally experienced through your work.
Speaker 4:So can you let us know actually um mentioned in the qa q a, an artist um where you know, if I think of of a feminist artist that has sort of influenced me or guided me over the years, it's Taiba Begum Lipi. But I don't think for myself like my works fall into that trajectory. I haven't really actually consciously thought about that Interesting.
Speaker 3:Any more questions? Amazing, right here.
Speaker 10:Thank you for the wonderful talk. It was really nice to see the works. I have some questions. I don't know if I would be able to frame or formulate the questions, but I'll try anyways.
Speaker 10:So the question with abstraction and also with reception of artworks, and since this exhibition is also somehow bringing artists from the south asia and to a wider international so-called audience, I'm really interested in how you say that you don't want to talk so much about your work as if you're leaving a space or a room for interpretation so you're giving agency to the audience, like the reception of it. I mean, I do have also have a really love-hate relationship with abstraction myself, so I'm also trying to understand the polysemous notion of abstraction. In so many ways I mean I wouldn't go there. But there's also a problem with I mean it's a problem or not a problem but this idea of living up in an open book, which is really interesting but at the same time, at least for me, this idea of the reception and agency of the viewers and also that might lead to because I mean misinterpretation is also a big issue and decontextualization of the works and of the artists themselves.
Speaker 4:Maybe, sabi and Ayesha, if you'd like to talk more about that- yeah, that's an interesting point, and I mean sometimes for these exhibitions there's a press release which sort of delves into the ideas or process of the work, so there is text that surrounds the exhibition. Or even if it's shown in a group presentation or if I'm working with a curator or even a writer, sometimes I have to also send a text when my work is shown somewhere. So that text does exist. But even like, for example, like the idea of showing this space with just sort of like bits and pieces from the my studio, what I actually enjoy about this space a lot is the fact that, you know, it kind of breaks down that barrier of the, the viewer audience, where you can sort of interact with the materials. Or, yeah, it's less precious in a way. I don't like to take myself too seriously.
Speaker 5:But have you ever come across drastic, severe misinterpretations that maybe even offended you?
Speaker 4:Sometimes when I've given like uh interviews, maybe in the transcription, like there's there, is there, there are some misquotes, or even with the, the title of the, the article online or in newspapers. That has happened, uh, I think, a couple of times. But I also like, don't read too much like stuff that's out there. I think at one point it was like it would get inside my head and really kind of it would be kind of crippling in a sense. But I stopped kind of reading reviews and text, yeah.
Speaker 5:I've noticed you speak a lot about process, how a work comes to life, finally. So that seems to be the space of conversation you like to privilege and prioritize.
Speaker 11:Yeah, Any other questions? Thank you. Any other questions, like when you are working with an artist, how it goes back and forth. You were talking about that, so I would like to know how it was with her and I would also like to know her side of process, how it was.
Speaker 4:If there's anything interesting you can share. I think working with Sabi has been a very intuitive and collaborative process. The exhibition actually came together over just I don't know maybe four or five months, over many different conversations and kind of looking at my portfolio and going through different bodies of work and trying to figure that out. And also, like the, I think the theme of the show is something that came together like near the end of the process, so it wasn't something that we had already like conceptualized at the beginning and then sort of selected or made the artworks, but like it was the opposite there was also some level of reservation you had about the title.
Speaker 5:Do you want to talk about it? Not really. No.
Speaker 5:Okay, not really the process from my side my God, so difficult, like she told me, this has to be this inch and exactly there. No, it was very dialogic and as we developed this, we had certain anchors and these are anchor points for like in terms of process, but also practice, of errors, and they became like our guide into what other works to have. So, as Aisha mentioned, breath count was an important anchor since the very beginning. It's a conversation that me and the team at Ishar were having and that kind of led to which other works to look at um, and then the miasms work, the one on the on the plin, the long um gauze, tissue kind of work that's in the center of the second space. That was another anchor point, and so the works that we started looking at started with what this evoked for us, and so to some extent it was rather intuitive.
Speaker 5:Me and the team, we work rather systematically, so it was also allowing ourselves to kind of work systematically but intuitively at the same time. We also, when we prepare shows at Ishara, we don't start with lists and excels, as I've mentioned previously, it doesn't start with an artist list or an artwork list and then see how to plot them onto a floor plan. We actually look a lot with sight lines. So over the summer of 2020, during lockdown, I learned SketchUp Completely, like on YouTube and stuff, and one architect friend gave me a tutorial. And so all the every time we start like working on a show, we have a dummy, a mock-up of the space, and we kind of see what are we seeing in our vision and what is on our peripheral vision and kind of like the way in theater you have this mechanism of blocking. You never have a theater actor turn your back to the audience, right, so we're looking at what is going to block our sightline, which work should come in the way? So we kind of guide ourselves through sightlines and so, looking at, we knew that somehow we want to be enveloped in Aisha's breath counts and a long durée of breaths that she's been kind of working on, and so when we started there, more things started unfolding and so, yeah, that's I.
Speaker 5:I mean, I don't know if that quite answers it, but that's kind of been the curatorial process in this show. It was around identifying certain anchors and developing it from there through sight lines and walking through like that. Yeah, one thing is consistent yeah, we don't start with artwork lists okay, we like this. We like this, we like this. Where do we plot this? That's like never been the case. And I don't start with artwork lists Okay, we like this, we like this, we like this. Where do we plot this? That's like never been the case and I don't think it's going to be as far as we're working together. Suhaila.
Speaker 9:Hi everyone, thank you for the wonderful talk and, aisha, it's so great to meet you without a screen in between us. I guess I just wanted to kind of reflect a little bit on some of the questions also that came before and, sabih, to tell you that I think we share a lot of the beef with abstraction, and perhaps that's one of the reasons when, aisha, when we spoke for that first time over Zoom, I was kind of trying to theorize this work with some sort of a framework of abstracting as a verb and it just wasn't landing. And well, perhaps that's one of the reasons why the text I ended up writing did not frame Aisha's work in sort of the ambits of abstraction. But what I do want to say on the question of representing or misrepresenting a work, I think, particularly with this show, I feel like there's also great value in perhaps misunderstanding work rather than misrepresenting.
Speaker 9:I think one big reason why I even decided to sort of link my life to art is because one day, as a young person, I had misunderstood a work of art and I was so touched by it I thought well, you know, this must be my future career Like this is amazing, this is wonderful, and um, I often joke that, um, I was able to be moved by art a lot more before becoming an art student. And actually I feel, aisha and this is, um, you know, kind kind of a privilege to have had experience as exhibition, because I felt that even though I did have the lists and I did have the names and years of the works and the mediums, and I still was able to be moved by them beyond those kind of frameworks of an object in a white cube and an object on a catalog page. So I just wanted to kind of, I guess, speak for this possibility of being wonderfully misunderstood or misread, but then that opens up so much more sometimes for a visitor and kind of touches upon parts of their own life and their own kind of psyche in ways that wouldn't have been possible otherwise, own kind of psyche in ways that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. And maybe a question, a short question that I will leave you both with. You know you mentioned Sabiha and the curation of the exhibition. You did not kind of begin with lists and yet you did have a PDF of, you know, nearly a thousand works.
Speaker 9:So I'm very curious right now what are we missing? What aspects of Aisha's practice. Are they different bodies of work? Are they different series of works or sort of an expanded version of what we're seeing here? Thank, you.
Speaker 5:Thank you, soyela. That was a beautiful and very important, I think, reminder about the importance of misunderstanding, misreading, and personally I too find works most compelling when I don't get it. If I get it, I've already moved on, you know. In fact, you want to see something that's pushing you, that you kind of sort of struggle with, and and that's why, like when an artist talks and many times, like all these interviews and on instagram influencer kind of feed, there's this kind of urgency to make everything so transparent and understood and articulated in fact, and so there's a great impatience when an artist is struggling to articulate their thought, or a curator is, but actually that struggle is very real, it's very. It's not because their language is poor, it's because the concepts they're dealing with don't yet have a language, so they're kind of it's not nonsensical, it's yet to become sensible, and that's really the space we're sharing when we look at art. That excites us and edgulizes us. So thank you for that, because it is that open space very much.
Speaker 5:What are we missing? I think that calls for another exhibition somewhere in the uae or somewhere else. Uh, but I mean, aisha, maybe you should answer that. What do you think?
Speaker 4:this show maybe did not I think it's working very well. I don't think it's missing anything else because, uh, we are it's, you know, showing different bodies of work with different timelines. So, yeah, I don't think there's anything missing really I.
Speaker 5:I realize that's not your question, but they're really as as we developed this, there was no uh pressure on us to feel all like, know, we should also show this and show that it just felt like no, this is complete in itself, and, in fact, a word that Priyanka Marzi and I used every now and then was we'd sometimes take a step in maybe adding another work or laying it out differently, and we'd come back to this phrase that no, it'll make it seem like we're underconfident about the work. To give an easy example the breath count series. It's very interesting to receive feedback from other colleagues and curators in the field, who I greatly respect. One curator said you know, there were too many breath counts. It could have just been pared down and we could have given more attention to the photographic threshold series. Another curator, friend of mine from Shanghai, came and said you know, I would have loved to see breath count just fill up the whole space. It shouldn't have been just one row.
Speaker 5:And so between us, we were considering some of these options as well, and there were also options as let's not put it in a straight line, let's play around with it, but that's where we use this term, that actually it's like we're being underconfident about what the work is doing. Let's not play around with it. Let's in fact follow it like a score, like a diary. And what happens with a diary? You actually go through a diary in a sort of linear fashion. You can jump pages, but you still have to turn pages. And we certainly didn't want to arrange them in a grid, because a grid makes the work into a calendar of sorts. So you're not actually following the breath temporally, you're following the breath as some kind of a calendrical kind of composition.
Speaker 5:Composition. So there was a certain kind of reminding ourselves we have to respect the confidence of the artists that they have invested in the work and not feel underconfident that in a large space like this we just have one row running through. We don't need two rows running through. We don't need three rows. We don't need them to become steps up and steps down scattered across. It doesn't need that. We have to be play with, not play. We have to sit with the confidence that Aisha has invested in the works and then be confident about it ourselves. Maybe last question, very last, okay, marzia Insider question.
Speaker 2:So we've talked a lot about certain works in the exhibition, so pools and uh and threshold and breath count especially, um. But I wanted to ask about the unfinished video. I have been very curious about it to hear you speak about it. Um, you know, you mentioned, uh, that mentioned that looking back at it 15 years after making it and in the context of this section of the exhibition that you know, it kind of makes you maybe think differently about it and in the sense that it makes you kind of reflect on how the process of making is so important in your work. So I was wondering if you could speak more about that and also share what drew you to capture. What can I mean, since it's not, you know, on display at the moment? What does it show and what drew you to capture those scenes in particular?
Speaker 5:Can I just come in with the context? There was a video running here Only for today's talk. We've turned the video off and you have a running slideshow Tomorrow. If you have a chance to revisit, you can see that video. It's a work that Aisha made in 2009 for Brito or with Brito.
Speaker 4:It was actually the work was made for a public art project with Brito Arts Trust. The public art project was called one square mile and uh, so yeah, in the video you see, I mean it has this kind of rough and unfinished quality to it, maybe also because technically I haven't really um played around with video work too much, uh, for myself. So it was sort of more for me like an archive and you know, kind of drawing inspiration from the city and looking at Dholaykhal, which is in the old part of Dhaka. It's the scrap metal yard of Dhaka, and you see these sort of scenes. They're mostly scenes taken early morning, black and white, shot in black and white, and some of the scenes are actually very, very slow moving, almost like a photograph.
Speaker 4:Back during that time I was also using a lot of photographic references for my work, so I think that you know that was on my mind too too, when I was like in terms of like the layout, of how I ended up composing the different shots.
Speaker 4:But it was looking at like different elements of the scrap metal yard, whether it's there's a presence of the hand of somebody working, or you see garbage heaps, or like different kind of metal, metallic objects, and you know, things from the scrap metal yard.
Speaker 4:So, yeah, that kind of again kind of looking back at this work after so many years, like this work was shown 15 years ago last. So it was really interesting for me to look. You know, looking to take a look at this yesterday, that was kind of um, it made sense like all the connections with all the tactile quality or the textured material that I was looking at back then this is also before before I started working on the graphite drawing series and also kind of thinking about, like you know, these are also spaces of transition. There are these ideas of economy and labor that sustains a city, or, like you know, you look at the garbage, the dumpster, and it's like you, you know you can make connections to like something that's waste, like not like everyday byproduct of your life, but sort of thinking about the consumption of material or the breaking down of material, but also kind of repurposing or the renewal of material in that specific neighborhood. So that's something that I was, you know, really fascinated by Like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no, thank you. I actually have another question related to that. I mean, you have you talked about how you use photography as a reference in your practice? And that kind of made me think of the Threshold series. And I mean, whether this is the case or not is perhaps the topic of a different discussion, but it seems to me that it's not as much of an abstract they're not as much of an abstract set of works as the rest of the exhibition. So it stands out in that way and I'm just wondering what draws you to photography as a medium?
Speaker 4:I think even when I was back in art school I was using a lot of photographing references in my work. They could be also like magazine collages, found photographs or pictures that I would just take to use for, you know, as reference for my paintings or my drawings For the Threshold series. They're actually like archives from family albums. For the Threshold series. They're actually like archives from family albums and, yeah, I was interested in like there are mostly pictures that my father had taken during his travels around the world. So I was really interested in kind of looking at these liminal spaces of the landscape and different types of landscape and monuments. And I really didn't get a chance to talk to him and kind of figure out his thoughts on why he would take or compose certain pictures the way he did. So I think that was sort of on my mind a lot after his passing. So that was sort of a way to remember him in a way or engage with him in that way. Yeah, thanks, faizi.
Speaker 5:Now we need to wrap up, but before we do, and before I hand over the mic to Noor to close today's panel, I also want to give a shout out to a whole lot of organizations and institutions that support practices like Aisha's, and I think it's the generosity of many such visionary organizations I mean, I'm not saying Ishaar is that, but I mean that we're surrounded by that have really nurtured practices that are kind of pushing boundaries and that are so exploratory in their intent In even making this show. We were aware of some of the spaces that Aisha's visited, where she studied what spaces led to the development of different works. The Samdani Art Foundation have been very crucial in supporting Aisha's career for the longest time, which are in Dubai, and they've also, in fact, did an artist drawing room a year ago and where we saw some of the drawings that inspired us. The Delfina Foundation, where you were on a residency, apparently a decade ago 2014? No, it's already been a decade. So there are a whole bunch of organizations and institutions that are not necessarily operating into.
Speaker 5:Okay, give us a portfolio, but where is? Where is this practice going to go? So we're very happy with like bringing an ecosystem of so many, so many organizations and and entities and people, including collectors such as jane and keto, who are here, who who's been supportive of aisha's practice. So a big round of applause to everyone who's actually supported Aisha and her practice, a big round of applause to yourselves for being here. Thank you very much. And, noor, you want to end?
Speaker 3:I just want to make sure that everyone knows that this entire conversation will be transported into the world of podcasting, where you can listen to it again on our collaborative season and also if you'd like to learn more about Smita Prabhakar, who is the founder of Rishad Art Foundation. I've also done an interview with her. This conversation will be on it and I think we have one more episode to go. So there's a lot to learn from these interviews and I'm really grateful that we get to get your real-time feedback and we recorded it. So thank you everyone for coming. Thank you so much and enjoy. We have some snacks at the back, as they're not the healthiest, the chunkiest snacks in Dubai, exactly. Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. If you would enjoy watching this conversation, we will have it up on YouTube in full video format, as well as reels on Instagram. So make sure to follow at Ishara Art Foundation as well as at Radical Contemporary to stay tuned with all of Ishara's Foundation, as well as at Radical Contemporary to stay tuned with all of Ishara's incredible art programming and exhibitions, as well as our future episodes and collaborations, and I will see you on our next episode.