Nobody Knows for Certain, 2023
Afrah Shafiq’s (b.1989 is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Goa, India) work emerges from long-term engagements with archives - both institutional and informal; stories and other fugitive material across the internet. Through a diversity of research modes and devices, her work also learns from practices of reading, organizing, 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. Within these she challenges set narratives with new readings and interpretations. Her work takes hybrid forms that bring together text, sound, animation, code, and sculpture to create interactive, sometimes simulated atmospheres to experience and unlearn. Her work often seeks ways to retain the tactile within the digital and poetry within technology.
Afrah’s work has been included in Dhaka Art Summit, curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2023; Video Art Pavilion at the Asian Art Biennale, curated by Anushka Rajendran, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2022; Lahore Biennial (LB02), curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, Lahore Pakistan; 2019; Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018, curated by Anita Dube, Kochi, India, 2018, among other exhibitions in India and abroad. Afrah is currently a fellow with the VM Salgaocar Fellowship Grants 2022 at the Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts. She has been a research fellow at the Institut d'études avancées de Nantes, France, attended an archival research residency in Texas and New Mexico with Fluent Collaborative, been a fellow at the Field Research Programme by the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and worked with a series of archives in the North of England through a residency with the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art. Recent exhibitions in 2023 include: WorldBuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist At Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf and Centre Pompidou-Metz; Very Small Feelings at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, curated by Akansha Rastogi (Senior Curator, KNMA) and Diana Campbell (Artistic Director, Samdani Art Foundation) with Ruxmini Choudhury, Avik Debdas, and Swati Kumari.