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Exhibitions | ENTER 09 - South Asian graduate New Media exhibition

Showing: Mon 19th Oct - Tue 1st Dec

Nine graduate students have been selcted for this year's show. You will find details about their careers to date and the work they will be showing below or you can click on the following link; enter09

Hamja Ahsan (MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice, Chelsea College of Art & Design, UK)

Hamja Ahsan is an artist and curator from the Bengali Islamic Diaspora, based in London and Dhaka. His practice investigates the space between critical thinking, curatorial practice and being an artist in the entire span of media from video, sound, text, drawing, publishing and directing exhibitions. He is concerned with reanimating models of public education, historical revisionism and cross-cultural exchange. His research interests include unthinking Eurocentrism, the rise of Asia, religious revivalism, the crisis of the nation-state and multiculturalism, security and surveillance and new formations of Imperialism. Ahsan has curated and exhibited in Tate Britain, Deptford X festival and Shanaakht festival, Karachi. He is currently working with Jazz musician Zoe Rahman on an archive of her album Where Rivers Meet and DRIK/ Chobi Mela founder Shahidul Alam on a photo essay on the fate of British Muslim political prisoners. Ahsan is co-director of Other Asias - a radical Pan-Asian arts movement based in London, Lahore and Dhaka. www.hamjaahsan.com

REDO PAKISTAN

REDO PAKISTAN - a staged press symposium and newspaper stall is a latest project curated by Hamja and Other Asias that took place during the recent Deptford X festival in London.

Pakistan was founded by Mohammed Ali Jinnah in 1947 - who served as its first Governor-General. Over the decades it has been founded again and again geographically, politically and intellectually by the temporary Governments, unstable rulers, natural hazards, and the political super powers. REDO PAKISTAN have brought together social envisioners from across Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, UK, Greece, Germany and Canada to fantasize remodelling the land, geographically, politically, intellectually in the Post-Imperial and Asian Diaspora context of London. Through creative and critical writing, drawings, performance, film, sound and painting the project aims to reform the view of this nation. What would a Pakistan, reconstructed in 2009, look like? The exhibition and newspaper have been used to activate a current of film screenings, short plays, symposiums, radio shows, poetry readings, political vocabularies, historical revisions, archives, discussions on travelling, Imperialism, the India-Pakistan Battle, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Allami Iqbal and Jinnah.

REDO PAKISTAN is a quarterly publication: the next issue shall be launched in Lahore in late 2009 and travel globally in 2010.  www.otherasias.com

Niharika Hariharan (MA Creative Practice for Narrative Environments, Central Saint Martin's, UK)

Niharika Hariharan's work and interest lie in understanding how design practices intersect with community, art and social sciences. She has worked on various multi-disciplinary projects that involve developing innovative research methods, story-telling techniques and scenario building. Most of her work begins with our everyday experiences which then take on the innovative form of interactive websites, printed communication material and films. Niharika seeks to continue to investigate new and interactive ways of engaging people and building new perspectives on issues and ideas that are pertinent to our lives, in a manner that is both playful and engaging.

Wandering Geography is an online platform that enables people to create, use and share way-finding methods that are not guided by city structures. Niharika's focus in the project was to create new ways of exploring spaces and looking at oneself through the lens of the city. Wandering Geography is based around a range of stories and anecdotes that people have contributed for this project. The final outcomes of this process were a series of wandering templates that people can download as guidelines to wander through spaces. Wandering Geography is an online networking site where users can meet and explore cities together as well as share their intuitive wandering experiences. This artistic research process spanned between London and Delhi. Further developed through a think-tank involving artist Tara Pattenden (Helsinki), interaction designer Crystal Campbell (London), Urbaneers (London) and web developers ‘Rear Solutions' (India).

www.wandering-geography.com 

Hicham Harrak (BA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art and Design, UK)

Hicham Harrak graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design with a BA in Fine Art earlier this year. His paintings have already been exhibited in several group exhibitions in London at the Chelsea College of Art & Design (2007 & 2009); House Gallery (2008); Nolia's Gallery (2007); and Dulwich Village (2004). 

Who is advertising? has developed out of Hicham's interest in painting, through which he investigates the construction of commercial images and the impact they have. He explores the relationship between the images of magazines and the reality of their effect on the consumers and the lives they lead. His work uses the instruments and the application of semiotics in the advertising industry used to attract the attention of the receivers. He manipulates photographs and texts in order to control the message being delivered to the viewer as he asserts, "I'm wrestling with the burden of telling the truth, which is known to some, whilst exploring the terminology and process of manipulation of an image to create an object of desire." Thereby seeking to understand why society chooses to employ magazines as a guide to understanding life.

Joshua Howland-Roohi (BA Graphic Design/New Media, Epsom UK)

Joshua Howland-Roohi graduated from the University of the Creative Arts, Epsom, earlier this year, with a BA in Graphic Design. His work and interests lie in the area of illustration and animation, and he is currently seeking to apply these skills towards working in the field of advertising. Joshua has also worked as a street trader, selling his own painted canvasses around the London.

 In the Shadow of War is an animation based around the Israel and Palestine conflict. Joshua narrates the story of one child caught in the everyday life in Gaza, in an attempt to encapsulate the harsh reality of the conflict. He explains, "Through the turmoil struggles of everyday life in Gaza comes the story of Sami Ashku. It is a communicative piece driven by tragic reality which will not only move you but make you think twice. The animation is aimed at teenagers and young adults with the hope of informing them on a serious topic in a digestible form".

Ayesha Moarif (MA, Image and Communication, Goldsmiths, UK)

A recent graduate from Goldsmiths with an MA in Image and Communication, Ayesha Moarif is a French-Pakistani, working and living in Vancouver and London. Her work is about the stories we weave to tell ourselves into existence, as private creatures and social beings. She maps the worlds she has traversed and the places in between through still and moving images. Working with photographs, objects and anonymous digital trails she expands her practice as a documentary photographer to explore more interactive narrative forms.

Burn After Reading is an interactive projection made up of hand-written confessions taken from gumtree.com. Viewers use a lighter to "illuminate" and read each confession, and then "burn" it. Posting a confession online is a cathartic act that appears to be the very antithesis of "burning after reading," yet Ayesha believes it calls on an anonymous reader. The anonymous reader of one's confession could constitute as one's own inner judge, or gentle listener, or any figure one sees fit to bare one's soul to.  She believes confessions of any era are interesting in that one confesses to the very place that helped forge the privacy of what they are experiencing: the sphere of society and public discourse. Depending on the viewer, the romanticism of the reading and burning act either emphasises upon or contrasts with what is shared. She asserts that those who interact with Burn After Reading should acknowledge the individuality of each confession and offer it a more satisfying catharsis.

www.ayeshamoarif.com

Nina Mangalanayagam (MA Photography, Royal College of Art, UK)

Born and raised in Sweden by a Danish mother and Tamil father, Nina Mangalanyagam lives and works in London. She recently graduated from the Royal College of Art with a Masters in Photography. A photographer of SriLankan-Swedish parentage, Nina uses her personal experiences and her family to explore the fluidity and tangible nature of identities. In 2005 she won the 2005 Jerwood Photography Award for her Snötäckt series. Images of her work also appeared in the December edition of Portfolio magazine. In 2006 she was shortlisted for Decibel, Visual Arts Awards, and in the following two years she was shortlisted for the Mangroup Photography Prize.

Lacuna  is a video performance of Nina attempting to do the Indian Head Nod, which is used heavily in South Asia for "yes", "no" or "maybe" as well as in Indian dance. Nina states, "I cannot do the movement properly and the piece is about the struggle of trying to fit in, to adapt to someone else's behaviour and the frustration of learning how." Her attempt runs for ten minutes, where the viewer can witness an increasing frustration in her movements, as she repeatedly fails to do it right. The piece is silent but with subtitles exposing personal fragments from her own experience: meetings with her Tamil family, personal stories on the relationship she had as a child to her father's background and to her own otherness in Swedish society.

Samra Saleem (MA Graphic Design Communications, Chelsea College of Art & Design, UK)

Samra Saleem hails from the Maldives and is currently, working and living in London. Her main areas of interest include Print, Identity and Photography. Whilst pursuing a BA in Graphic Design at the University of Creative Arts, Epsom, UK, she worked on several external projects within the UK and in the Maldives. In 2008, she worked with 3MM as part of the design team establishing a brand identity for Maldivian Airlines. She also gained experience working with Popular Society in the same year, creating images for an animation work for Topshop.

Are there people living in the Maldives?

Samra reflects on her own homeland in this project, as she states, "The Maldives are recognized as ‘The sunny side of life' due to the beautiful white sand beaches, turquoise blue seas and the warm hot sun. Does anyone ever wonder whether there could be more to it than just that?" Through this work she explores the contrast between the tourist perception and the reality of the Maldives. Consisting of images of the "pseudo-perfect" Maldives from brochures and advertisements juxtaposed with photographs of the "real" Maldives, Samra attempts to unravel this dichotomous identity. She attempts to illustrate and highlight other aspects of her country, its people and culture which have been marginalised in order to create the perfect facade that is used to attract the tourists.

www.samrasaleem.com

Maithili Pradhan (BA Criticism, Communication & Curation: Art & Design, Central Saint Martin's (University of the Arts London), UK)  

Maithili Pradhan curates and her area of interest during her undergraduate years lay in Indian Contemporary and Modern Art including her degree dissertation which was a study of the depiction of women by two key Indian artists who were instrumental in shaping Indian modernism. She has worked at the Ashni Art Gallery and with freelance editor Kathleen Madden on the publication for the Serpentine Gallery's Indian Highway exhibition in London. She is currently pursuing her MA in Art Business at the Sotheby's Institute in London.