“I didn’t realize that there would be a community for this or that anyone else would have an interest, and it turned out that there were people that wanted this access to this.”
Artists and Rights, Episode 5: The Brown Ceiling and Possible Futures
Artists and Rights, Episode 6: Behind the Closed Door: Intimacy, Collaboration, and Access
Arshia Fatima Haq (born in Hyderabad, India, based in Los Angeles, CA) works across film, visual art, performance, and sound. She is interested in counter-archives, speculative documentaries, and the intersections of fact and fiction, and is currently exploring themes of embodiment and mysticism, particularly within the Islamic Sufi context. Her work emerges from the complexities of inhabiting multiple personas – woman, Muslim, immigrant, citizen – and is conceptualized in feminist modes outside of the Western model. Narrative threads include migration, celebration, warfare, nostalgia, homeland, and borders, often within realms of Islamic influence, through both traditional forms and kaleidoscopic reinventions via pop culture. She is the founder of Discostan, a collaborative decolonial project working with cultural production from the SWANA (South and West Asia and North Africa) region.
Haq’s work has been featured at Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Broad Museum, LACE, Toronto International Film Festival, MOMA New York, Hammer Museum, LAXArt, Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Pacific Film Archive. Currently, she hosts and produces monthly radio shows on Dublab and NTS, and recently released an album of field recordings from Pakistan on the Sublime Frequencies label. She received her MFA in Film and Video from California Institute of the Arts in 2005, and is a recipient of the California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship, the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, and the Onassis AIR Fellowship.
You can also find Arshia Haq here:
KCRW Lost Notes Podcast: Searching for the Root: The Incredible Journey of Aisha Ali.
The LA Artist in Residence at the Echo Park Film Center.
Freewaves presented LOVE &/OR FEAR: A Celebration of Genders in 2019, featuring the artist.
The artist was a part of Triple Canopy’s Public Engagement residency at the Hammer Museum.
Selected Work
Arshia Haq, The Second Coming Of Fatima, 2019. Hydrocal, gold leaf, powdered mica, dirt, velvet, sound, Los Angeles.
Arshia Haq, Ajnabi Milan, 2019. Performance and digital print, Los Angeles.
Arshia Haq, Ajnabi Milan, 2019. Performance and digital print, Los Angeles.