Creative corner
Into the artist’s studio: Afrah Shafiq codes histories in Goa
In the Lounge Art Special, we offer a peek into the studios of leading contemporary artists. At her workspace in Torda, Goa, she creates immersive environments using archival material and code
Lush greenery leads up to Afrah Shafiq’s home-cum-workspace in Torda, north Goa. In a 90-year-old Portuguese bungalow, Shafiq, 34, has converted one of the rooms into a studio of sorts. On most days, you can find the artist sitting in her gamer’s chair, sifting through digitised archives—both institutional and informal—to find new perspectives or challenge existing ones from within historical narratives.
She combines text, sound, textile motifs, animation and code to create interactive and immersive atmospheres in her work. For instance, in the ongoing exhibition I Fell Asleep Believer And Woke Up An Atheist at Experimenter, Hindustan Road, Kolkata, she has based a narrative video game, Nobody Knows For Certain, on the illustrated children’s books from erstwhile Soviet Union that made their way to India during the Cold War years. This stems from a long project around archival material related to Soviet history. “I usually look at large volumes of archival material, find gaps, trace connections and piece together stories, which might not be apparent. In this case, the archival material lay in the books themselves, after which I looked at the changing idea of a nation, and how a child’s mind gets embroiled in that,” she elaborates.
Since her work is animation and code-based, most of the day finds her in front of the screen. Her collaborators on sound, music and video have functional studios of their own, and they all connect remotely. In such a scenario, the studio location helps her to take a break from the screen. She can see the Torda creek from one of the windows and a large bimbli tree in the garden from the other. “The area allows me to breathe and let my mind zoom out,” says Shafiq, who moved to Goa from Bengaluru seven years ago; and to this house six months back.
The move to Goa led to several new research interests. One of these stemmed from the diverse representations of Mother Mary. Shafiq began to notice the various titles that were attributed to her—ranging from “Our Lady of Good Health” and “Our Lady of Perpetual Glory” to some quaint ones like “Our Lady of Workers”. The iconography varied as well, with some portraying her in a sari, and in rare cases, showing her as a black Madonna. “The same icon had different attributes. So, I started building an archive of Mother Mary in all post-colonial nations, while also creating parallels between pre-Christian deities in those regions,” she elaborates.
For Shafiq, organising data is extremely important, since she works with a large amount of it. In her studio, she has something that looks like a mini-fridge, but contains numerous hard disks containing archives of each project. “Even when I start a new project, I will make sub-folders out of archived data. And sometimes the ideas and humour within the artwork begins to take shape with the naming of the folders,” says Shafiq. For one archive, which contained thousands of images of women from the same period but portrayed in different mediums, she created sub-folders named “Daydreaming” and “Mansplaining”. It helps her make sense of large volumes of data.
Also read: Into the artist's studio: A fluid space for Gigi Scaria's practice
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First Published:30 Jan 2024, 01:00 PM IST
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