About
On Vasl’s rooftop on a balmy October evening during the KB2 festival, Hira Khan (Project Coordinator at Vasl) opened a conversation with Noorafshan Mirza about her practice, process and forthcoming collaborations.
Artist’s Statement
I was grateful for this opportunity to look forwards and backwards in time. To share lessons learnt, experiences, and artworks embodied. I felt it an opportunity to reflect on work and practice rooted in my experience of the city of Karachi, and the legacies of a period in time which gave birth to “The Museum of Non Participation project 2008-2016. I talked about returning to the city as if she was a good old friend, which was to say that nothing much had changed between us and yet nothing looked the same.
At the same time, I wanted to represent the present by imagining the journey of being “of but not from” & “from but not of” the sub-continent. This led to the talks title: All the lives, (n)ever lived. I had found myself in Karachi this trip after months of travel through the sub-continent with friend, artist, collaborator, Priya Panchalingam. A journey also through our experiences of growing up in western anglophone speaking cultures (UK & Australia respectively) and having our roots in South Asia. We in turn took each other to ancestral parts of Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan and explored the multitude of intimate encounters and conversations unfolding the plurality of all our lives. What does it mean to travel through parts of yourself imagined in a parallel universe? for example experiencing growing up as a Hyderabadi, being a musician, or researching textiles for a new fashion collection? Simultaneously Priya and I were both researching and scripting a collaborative intersectional feminist film of a journey through the artery of our imagined sub-continent.
The final part of my talk took the form of an in-depth discussion of my recent collaborative exhibition project “The Scar” and my first artist collaborative feature film for the cinema: “Ruptures”. This body of artistic practice has been produced with my long-term collaborator Brad Butler over the duration of 4 years (2015-2019) on the subject of state enforced disappearance and structures of patriarchal violence. I plan to return to Karachi soon, if so I will bring this work with me to share with you.
Noorafshan Mirza’s practice is founded on long term collaboration and collectivity. As a co-founder of the London-based centre for artist film production, no.w.here, she creates work which spans the moving image, installation, sound, text and performed actions. Her practice explores themes of resistance, inequality, power and privilege, and (non) participation. Along with her long-term collaborator the artist Brad Butler they have currently finished their first fiction feature film Ruptures (2019), accompanied by an exhibition project The Scar (2018) on state enforced disappearance. Between 2009 and 2016 their art practice was framed as a fictional institution. This ‘Museum of non Participation” which sought to confront (non) participation as a neoliberal condition and a threshold – between forms of resistance and forces of oppression.
