Asuf Ishaq
with Emily Butler
‘I draw into my family history, mostly storytelling and the passing down of experiences. I use what archive the body carries, as well. It’s like digging for histories or stories which are buried or untold.’
Listen to the full interview here:
I’m Asuf Ishaq and my practice is centred around themes of embodiment, fragmentation and displacement, especially in the migration and post-colonial; and memory, often presented in a physical diasporic body, as in an evolving archive that transmits experience with cultural and political meaning.
What are you showing in The London Open 2022?
I’m showing the film I made in 2020, which is called Mother. It’s trying to foster an understanding of a shared familial history. I address the experience of displacement, reconciling memories and artefacts from lost times and places. In Mother, I digitally restore a personal photograph of my mother when she was young. It’s about 50 years old.
The dialogues are centred around the photograph and revealing histories and retelling of stories. The social history is in a fragmented form.
The film starts with a detail of architecture overlaid with a phrase you say which is, ‘I’m looking at the holes that make a radiant pattern. And it lets the light in.’ It’s like a metaphor for a lot of what your work’s doing. You’re unearthing family histories, histories of displacement, migration, possibly trauma. You’ve talked in the past about having an approach like that of an archaeologist. Can you tell us about this?
I mentioned about how it’s finding these kinds of powerful memory fragments, like how Harun Farocki does with archive and really looking at the work. I draw into my family history, mostly storytelling and the passing down of experiences. I use what archive the body carries. It’s like archeology of histories or stories which are buried or untold.
There’s another beautiful image and central part of the film, which is, as you mentioned, you repairing an old photograph of your mother. You’re using Photoshop to piece it together, so that it looks almost seamless. In parallel, you’re gathering fragments of your mother’s memories for your conversation to build a narrative. But at no point are we offered a complete picture. There’s this idea that repair or completion is potentially impossible, and your work’s really looking at these gaps and holes. Can you tell us about this approach to looking at gaps and memories?
You’ve got that right completely. It’s how memory behaves. There’s nothing certain about it and it’s always fragmented. But then you have different perspectives. I was in Pakistan with her when I was young, so I have these emotional memories as well, where I was too young to understand, but I had my perspective. It’s true; the photograph is incomplete and there’s no final, repaired photograph.
It’s the process I am interested in, and while repairing it in Photoshop, we went into a space where we, as mother and child, normally would not go, talking about art and looking at an image in-depth. That was quite special, that we could interact in a different way.
Speaking of dialogue, not all of your conversation with your mother is translated, so an English-speaking audience might not understand everything, just fragments or words that are translated. There’s a flipping between hearing your narration and your mother’s voice in the work. Can you tell us about your approach to language and narration?
I deliberately wanted to evoke a little bit of discomfort in not understanding, because it’s also the experience of my mother in the beginning, moving to England, and not quite understanding the language. I wanted to bring that element into the work, just to make the viewer a little bit uneasy, trying to make sense of what is being heard, and trying to make sense of the memory.
Work in the exhibition:
Mother, 2020
HD film
16:04 mins
Asuf Ishaq (b. 1969, Mirpur, Pakistan)
2020 MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London 1996 MA Graphic Design, Royal College of Art, London
1993 BA Graphic Design, University of Brighton
Selected exhibitions: Image Behaviour, ICA, London (2022); New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London and Firstsite, Colchester (2021); Groundings, Goldsmiths CCA, London (2021); Inside the Country of the Skin, Stryx, Birmingham (2021); Longshore Drifting, Safehouse 1, London (2021); London Grads, Saatchi Gallery, London (2020); Incarnations, Montez Press Radio, New York (2020); Indernet Festival, Cologne (2020); Members Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2019)
