Asuf Ishaq   

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Tape Letter
2020 
HD Film
2 mins 30 secs




In this film Ishaq re-acts the recordings his mother recording a voice letter to her family in Kashmir.

Tape letters or voice recordings of the 1960’s/70’s diaspora communities in UK, a British history that included Ishaq’s parents from Kashmir. I am exploring these intimate relationships and communication through technology, and voice messages. This is ongoing new project, Bishopsgate Institute London have an archive of tape cassette letter recordings of Pakistani’s who migrated to United Kingdom. 

Ishaq’s works in ‘hybridity’ or hybrid forms, just as I navigate through my cultural identity. Mixing documentary, fiction, personal, and experimental genres, as well as different media and mediums, such as cement/plaster, metal, film and photography. By pushing the limits of any one of these genre, this hybrid way of working forces each genre to explain itself, to forgo any transparent relationship to the reality it represents, and to make evident the knowledge claims on which it is based. My way of working is in a position to do archeology, to dig up the traces that the dominant culture overlooks, and for that matter any fixed cultural organization.




Articles of Home Exhibition, Reid Gallery, Glasgow 2023