Arshia Fatima Haq

Arshia Fatima Haq (born in Hyderabad, India) works across film, visual art, performance and sound. She works through counterachives and speculative narratives, and is currently exploring themes of embodiment, mysticism, indigenous and localized knowledge, particularly within the Islamic Sufi context . She is the founder of Discostan, a collaborative decolonial project and record label working with cultural production from South and West Asia and North Africa. She hosts and produces monthly radio shows on NTS. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally at museums, galleries, nightclubs, and in the streets, and has been featured at MoMA in New York, the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, the Broad Museum, LACE, the Toronto International Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, NPR, and the Pacific Film Archive amongst others. She received her MFA in Film and Video from CalArts and is currently based in Lοs Αngeles.

Arshia Fatima Haq is a participant of the (Inter)national Residency Program of Οnassis AiR 2019-20 and of the Tailor-made Fellowships program 2022-23.

The visible morphology of the earth around us is the expression of continual and invisible tectonic movements deep beneath the surface. In some ways, human behavior manifests in a similar mode. Our practices, habits, and belief systems are formed at a fundamental level by processes that operate below our liminal perception in realms that evoke and appeal to our subconscious, as well as unconscious, realms of being. Our early memories, our body of humor, our folktales, and our mythologies are what we carry with us even when peοple are forced to leave behind and live without the physical objects that might otherwise define home and identity. These elements seed the psychic structures we inhabit in the visible world and manifest as future narrative possibilities to inform the creation (and continual recreation) of identity in the world.

The research of Arshia Fatima Haq in Αthens will involve working with Urdu-speaking Afghani and Pakistani refugees within local refugee camps in the city and in associated surrounding locations. Through audio and video field recordings conducted conversationally, she will gather early memories, folk tales, favorite jokes and songs to create an archive of cultural production that functions as a site of resistance and redemption to current narratives of trauma, loss and displacement that reduce and dehumanize refugees’ identities and agencies. These recordings develop and build upon informal interviews and field recordings she has conducted in Pakistan, Algeria, Lebanon, and Morocco. She relates these tales and memories to the concept of the imaginary that exists transnationally and transgenerationally. They are subliminal, etched-in sounds that connect to one another as soundtracks of hypnagogic dreamlike states that conjure and influence possibilities for the worlds we aspire to live in.

She will also produce a site-specific iteration of her ongoing social practice project Discostan, in collaboration with local artists of varying heritage and geographic origin from both within and outside of refugee populations. 'Discostan' will incorporate video art, musicians, and DJs to create a social space inclusive of both refugee populations new to Αthens as well as those who identify as Greek citizens, exploring mutual points of shared heritage and countering the notion of refugees as outsiders.