Artist Films

About this event

'Extra Valuable Person' by Dan Auluk

Dan Auluk (b. 1970) is an artist-curator & filmmaker, born and based in Birmingham. In 2014 I graduated with a MA in Fine Art, at The School of Art, Birmingham City University where I began to further explore my relationship with others as a way of working through my lived experiences.

Since 2012, I have created collaborative live art experimental performance exhibitions and projects that attempt to destabilise authorship.

In 2016 Feature PROJECT (2016 - 2018) was an online audio-visual collaborative space of exchange & GRASSLANDS (2015 -2017) an outdoor residency programme for artists/curators. For some of these projects (We don’t talk anymore 1&2 (2017/2018)) I utilise exhibition making as a medium to explore how we communicate and interconnect by creating situations that generate potential new ways of presenting art. Sometimes these projects actively include other artists and audiences, to gain new perspectives and viewpoints; but I also develop projects that are around one-to-one encounters.

These live reflexive collaborations explore experimental ways of (de)activating space(s) and enabling audience engagement and participation.

Mother by Asuf Ishaq

Ishaq’s film ‘Mother’, explores the back story of a fifty-year-old photograph of his mother, and draws out memories and thoughts. Ishaq moves through spaces, gathering up histories and memories that are lost or covered over in the movement of displacement, and begin to produce new knowledge.

He explores the photograph with his mother, and involves her in his art-making, a space where they usually would not overlap. Ishaq untangling his mother's memories. Deploying bright spaces of a virtual environment of the computer screen, where the photograph appears to be in the process of being restored. The photograph is a transitional and a transnational object, objects can be considered as an external objects that a person partially incorporates.

Different times and spaces are explored, including the house where the wall is always present and standing. Just as his mother's faith, always solid as the wall and constant in her life.

Asuf Ishaq ’s art practice is concerned with themes of embodiment, fragmentation, displacement, migration and memory, often presenting the physical diasporic body as an evolving archive that transmits experience with cultural and political meaning. Ishaq’s work unravels across spaces and narratives to reveal new meanings and draw out personal histories. Working with narration, words, sound and images, he deploys fiction, non-fiction, archival material, storytelling and personal memories in works that manifest as moving image, sculpture, installation, sonic and photography.

Ishaq studied MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College of Art in London. He has shown work recently; Image Behaviour 2021 at ICA, New Contemporaries 2021 at South London Gallery & Firstsite Colchester, Grounding online screening at Goldsmiths CCA, Safehouse 1, London Now, Saatchi Gallery (2020). Currently showing the film ‘Mother’ at The London Open exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery.

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Organiser:

The Festival is co-directed by Dr Sanjukta Ghosh (SSAI) and Farzana Qureshi (SOAS Library).

The festival is in partnership with South Asian Heritage Month, the well-known month-long celebration in the United Kingdom (similar in spirit to Black History Month) to celebrate the heritage of people with roots in the South Asian countries of Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives.

The SOAS SAHM is in collaboration with Jasvir Singh OBE and Dr Binita Kane along with the wider team members.

Contact email: ssai@soas.ac.uk