Afrah Shafiq

Using the process of research as an artistic playground, Afrah Shafiq (b. 1989) creates work that emerges from long-term engagements with archives, both institutional and informal, stories, and other fugitive material across the internet. Her work intertwines history, memory, folklore, and fantasy to create a speculative world born of remix culture. Through a diversity of research modes and devices, the work is informed from practices of reading, organising, plotting, and classifying. Shafiq is interested in the rupturing of existing narratives, ‘searching’ for the invisible, and creating subversive, speculative new ways of looking at the familiar. Her work takes hybrid forms that bring together text, sound, animation, video games, and sculpture to create interactive, sometimes simulated, atmospheres to experience and unlearn. She seeks ways to retain the tactile within the digital and poetry within technology.

 

Afrah Shafiq lives and works in Goa, India.

 

Select solo and group exhibitions include WorldBuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age, Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf (2024); I Fell Asleep a Believer and Woke Up and Atheist, Experimenter – Hindustan Road, Kolkata (2024); Choose your Player. Gaming from Dice to Pixel, The Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen (2024 – 2025); Autohistorias, Beaux-Arts de Paris, Paris (2024); Liminal Gaps at NMACC Mumbai (2024); Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz (2023 - 2024); As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories - Fragments for a Geopoetics of North Eurasia, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin (2023 - 2024); Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka (2023); LEEDS 2023: Year of Culture and The British Council, The Tetley, Leeds (2023); the Video Art Pavilion, Asian Art Biennale, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2022); Lahore Biennial (LB02), Lahore (2019); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi (2018), among others.