Revelation: a Performative talk with my father

In October 2017, I offered a talk at the Surrey Art Gallery’s public forum on the exhibition Ground Signals. My father performed a hamd (devotional chant) during this performance. I had just spent time with my father earlier that week riding the train across Canada recreating my father’s migration from Toronto to Edmonton where he first settled in Canada. During our time on the train, rolling over the beautiful territories and lands we know as Canada, I interviewed my father, listened to his stories about relationship to the land in India, Pakistan and here on this continent. He read me poems, we wrote together and constructed a collaborative ghazal. At the Surrey Art Gallery, I offered a new work called Revelation, a video that plays on the floor surrounded by a brick structure, relating to Indian construction and ideas of home.

Revelation (2017), video installation with bricks, Surrey Art Gallery

Wash and Fold: new work in progress

Wash and Fold: revelatory housekeeping during an age of pandemic and racial injustice

I’m excited to share a new video I’m presenting through the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria on the national arts platform Fieldtrip. Wash and Fold highlights ideas I’m working with in new video and performance works I’m developing with Aisha and my parents.

The process of sharing my process was challenging and illuminating. I draw from everything around me, often the invisible materials of life like relationships, felt senses of spaces, and the longings of my heart. I get personal in this video sharing what’s been coming up for me in this time of home retreating during the pandemic: navigating parenting a teenager, being far from my mother and my father and witnessing systemic violence being called out.

Filming with Kyra Kordoski and Aisha at home during a pandemic was tender and caring, wearing masks, we washed each others hands and feet and folded laundry. When I watch the footage, I begin to see the language between our bodies, cloth and soap.

it takes friction

to create a lather

holding this body

in a slippery space

between us

vanishing

as we listen

washing

what can’t be seen

still from Wash and Fold, work in progress with Aisha Haq

Remembering Our Mothers

Remembering Our Mothers was a participatory art, food and spirit gathering that emerged from a collaboration with Gerry Ambers (Namgis Nation, Alert Bay, BC).  I wanted to situate my exhibition within indigenous territory, history and ways of knowing, while calling upon my own tradition of ancestor respect and devotion.  Because the work in the show is about motherhood, Gerry and I created a ceremony that pulled in ideas from the exhibition with a chance for viewers to actively participate in connecting with ideas of the maternal, their ancestors and acknowledging the land we rest on as a nourishing body.

Remembering Our Mothers took place on Friday November 18, 2016 as a pre-opening event for the exhibition Being Home.   A circle of almost 80 people gathered to breathe together, acknowledge the land, call forth their ancestors, make an offering and feast on seasonal soup. Much gratitude to Gerry Ambers for the gift of friendship and the opportunity to work together and to MediaNet for supporting this event and for serving soup and drinks!

Here is the invitation that went out to the community:  "Remembering Our Mothers is a participatory art, food & spirit gathering led by Gerry Ambers & Farheen HaQ honouring place and the nourishment received by maternal bodies around us - mothers, grandmothers, the land and water.  All are welcome to join the artists to acknowledge the land and season we inhabit, celebrate place and ancestors and feast on the gifts of the earth."

Dough offerings from the public on the altar created for maternal ancestors

Children gather around the altar, adding their creations.

Making and feasting 

Sharing seasonal soup.  Thank you to Anna of Bread & Butter catering.

Being Home in Kelowna

Bringing my latest exhibition Being Home from Vancouver Island to the Okanagan, had me asking questions of how we honour the ways land nurtures us and how we can render visible the work of motherhood in all its forms . In order to activate the site of my new exhibition and to bring my work out of the gallery, I created a public offering before the opening of the show: 

CRADLE, TABLE, FEAST: A participatory art & food event by visiting artist Farheen HaQ honouring place, nourishment, and home.  Activating the extended tablecloth used in her performative video installations on show at the Alternator,  Farheen invites the community to gather around her dastarkhan - a long tablecloth placed on the ground in South Asia to share in gratitude and feasting.  All are welcome to bring an offering to this great spread and to join in reflecting on the ways we are all nourished by the maternal bodies around us - mothers, grandmothers, the land, this place.  

A gathering clustered around the tablecloth, sipping chai, various children created a mandala from materials by nearby Knox Mountain where I had taken my children to hike earlier that morning.  Acknowledging the land and the Syilx territory I was visiting, I invited people to join me in laying down on the tablecloth, guiding the group in a meditative reflection on the ways our bodies are nourished, our connection to maternal energies and our foremothers through the rise and fall of our bellies, and our bodies as expressions of the land living through us.  The tablecloth was spread with laying bodies, changing our orientation and our habitual way of coming into contact with the outdoor surroundings. 

** Many thanks to the Alternator staff for their support and to Crystal at ChaiBaba tea for the chai.

Welcoming gatherers to the pre-opening feast. Photo: Megan Bowers

Earth offering from a morning walk up nearby Knox Mountain, arranged by children participating in Cradle, Table, Feast.  Photo: Megan Bowers

Shifting our bodies in public space: a laying meditation acknowledging the body, land and nourishment.  

Photo: Megan Bowers

A public feast before the opening of Being Home, Kelowna, BC  July 15, 2016

Photo: Megan Bowers

12 Gates Video Art Festival in Philadelphia

Drinking from my mother's saucer will be screening at the 12 Gates Contemporary Video Art Festival this week in Philadelphia, Sat June 11, 2016.

The 2nd Annual 12G Contemporary Video Art Festival celebrates contemporary video art from or about the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. This 2nd edition of the juried show will be co-presented by Asian Arts Initiative in a tunnel (!)  under Philadelphia's Reading Viaduct on Pearl Street, carrying over the experimental nature of the works to be screened. Check out more info here.

Audience at 12 Gates Video Art Festival in Philadelphia, June 2015

Interview with DHC/ART Montreal

Read my interview recently posted on the DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art's blog here.

Faith & Fashion in Montreal

On March 16, 2016 I had the pleasure of speaking at a panel discussion hosted by DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art (Montreal) in association with the London College of Fashion. 

The discussion was hosted by Reina Lewis who recently wrote the book titled "Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures."  She moderated a discussion between the audience , and fellow panelists Jasmine Zine (Wilfred Laurier University), Cheryl Sim (Curator DHC/Art Foundation) and Yasmin Jiwani (Concordia University).  It was a stimulating evening of interrogating the narratives surrounding Muslim women in our mainstream media and ways that artists and Muslim women themselves create their own representations.

For the live podcast listen here.  

You can view the video recording of the event here.

Offerings in Victoria

On Friday Jan 15th, Open Space in Victoria BC hosted the opening of "Offerings" a collaborative exhibition by artist France Trepanier and five local guest artists.  Over 150 people attended and the evening was a heartfelt and powerful manifestation of what it looks like to indigenize gallery spaces.  Thank you to all who attended the opening and to all the artists who I learned a lot from.

Kate Cino graciously documented the exhibition and the opening here.   The show runs until Feb 20, 2016.  

Film screening in NYC

My video The Table will be screened in New York this Saturday December 5th as part of SAWCC's (South Asian Women's Creative Collective) New Works Film screening.  More info here: http://www.sawcc.org/new-films-2015/