AFRAH SHAFIQ

Sultana’s Reality, 2017

Liminal Gaps, NMACC
Mumbai, India
31st March, 2024 - 9th June, 2024

CURATION AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCTION BY TRIADIC

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Afrah Shafiq (b. 1989, Mumbai) is a multidisciplinary artist based out of Goa, India. Using the process of research as an artistic playground, she intertwines archival findings, history, memory, folklore and fantasy to create a speculative world born of remix culture. Her work moves across various mediums drawing from the handmade language of traditional folk forms and connecting them to the digital language of the Internet and video games.

Sultana’s Reality is an interactive multimedia story that explores the relationship between women and the colonial education movement in India using archival imagery, women’s writing and history.  Drawing its title from Sultana’s Dream, the 1905 science-fiction short story of feminist utopia, by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein, Sultana’s Reality explores the inner lives of the first generation of women to be educated in pre-independent India. The story is told through animated video, graphics, gifs, comics, collages and other digital art forms made by collating, re-mixing, re-interpreting and re-imagining visual imaginations of the female form as seen in the archives of the CSSSC, Kolkata. The work tries to explore the multiplicity of women’s history and also image making – the ways in which it is told and remembered.

This work was made possible by an Archival and Museum Fellowship by India Foundation for the Arts at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, with support from Voltas Limited. All archival imagery in this work is from the CSSSC, Calcutta.

Writing, Research, Art, Animation: Afrah Shafiq
Additional Animation & Compositing: Hardik Kapadia and AEON Creative Garage
Web Interface: Prathamesh Pai
Music: Kuber Sharma, Arnold Misquitta and Rushad Mistry
Sound Design: Abishek Ramesh
Text Edit: Paroma Sadhana
Install Production Support: Shruthi Pawels