afsana-aj

[afsana-aj]

Identity politics is something that i have always been drawn to ever since college. I have always been a vocally active person and speak up for what’s right, especially for marginalised communities. I started using my art as a platform to express these thoughts and I have never looked back. 

The main thing that i love about Identity politics within art is that you can learn so much from the beautiful pieces of work that artists make. It’s a different way for us to learn about things that are not taught in mainstream schools. I think especially for POC it is important as we are taught about the history of the country we are living in, but we don’t get to learn about the history of our own cultures. I have learnt a lot about the history of Bangladesh just from looking at artists work, i have learnt things that i have never learnt before such as how the UK had a huge impact on Bangladesh. 

Through my work i want to educate people on Muslim women and that the typical stereotypes you see on the news does not represent every single Muslim woman out there in the world. 

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As well as main stream media portraying Muslim women as oppressed, the same goes for Hollywood. 

Why is it that in almost every single movie/ tv series i have watched that has a Muslim woman in it, always ends with the owman taking her hijab off to ‘feel free’ or to capture the attention of her white knight?

This portrayal just makes people think that muslim women really are oppressed and that they can only have fun and live their life once they remove their hijab. They are showing that the woman only feels empowered once she takes it off and rejects the ‘barbaric’ traditions of her faith. 

Why can’t a woman feel empowered whilst fully clothed? Why does she have to dress provocatively or has to show skin to be/feel powerful? Of course this is where the male gaze comes in to play. This is something that i would like to explore within my art work. For now i am just exploring women and their stories, but i would like to go further into the whole Muslim woman stereotypes and show how untrue they are through my work. 

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This articles talks about the hijab ban in Belgium, where the government has decided to ban any religious or political symbols and of course for Muslim women that meant not being able to wear the hijab. So this is now forcing Muslim women to either choose between their religion or their faith. 

Mainstream media talks about Islam forces women to wear the hijab and that this is oppression, but how is this any better? They have taken away the freedom of choice from Muslim women to wear what they want to wear and in doing so it has limited Muslim women from getting an education and jobs. So now women have gone from being forced to cover up, to being forced to show their skin.

Through my work i want to make it blatantly obvious that these women have CHOSEN to wear the hijab and they still live a normal life. Their faith or culture doesn’t limit them from doing anything. 

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This article is about Seema Yasmin, a Muslim woman who wrote a book about how Muslim women can do anything, from open heart surgery, to shopping. The idea for this came when she watched an American female Muslim fencer win at the olympics and all people could talk about was how she was a Muslim woman- like Muslim women can’t do anything else but be housewives? 

The biggest stereotype i hear is that South Asian woman have an arranged marriage, wear a hijab and have lots of children and thats all they do with their lives. Yes this maybe true for a lot of the older genertaion, but you can’t tell me that this isnt also true for a lot of the older non-muslim genertaion. These days women are a lot more independent, they go to school, have jobs, a life other than marriage and kids, but i feel like thats a side that mainstream media rarely shows. So, it is up to us to show that side of us, to show people that we are just normal women, we just dress differently to you. 

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This year i have decided to interview the subjects within my work and gain an understanding of their hijab story. However, due to the pandemic I wasn’t able to interview as many people as i would’ve liked to, so i have decided to look at articles where Muslim women have already shared their stories. 

Due to Islamaphobia the hijab has now become a symbol of oppression in the eyes of some non-muslim people. I find this shocking because for many Muslim women, including myself, we feel the hijab is a symbol of our power. Now countries such as France and Belgium have banned women from wearing the hijab - telling a woman what she can and can’t wear, sounds a lot like oppression to me. 

In recent years with the rising power of social media and ‘Influencers’, i think there has been a greater understanding of Muslim women especially within the younger generation as Muslim women and even men talk about their lives and what it means to be Muslim. Social media shows a different side to Islam, compared to what you see on mainstream media. Young Muslim women consciously mobilise social networks, posting photos and using hashtags that show them as fashion consumers and just like any other young woman would. 

Stereotypes say Muslim women are self-segregated, and their faith and hijab prevent them from engaging in public life. For me and majority of the Muslim women i know, this is not true. We all enagage in social life, have been to school, college and some even to university, which of course has meant we have come into contact with the opposite gender and engaged in social events together. However, there are some women i know that choose not to socially engage with males and that is completely their choice, not because they have been forced. These women still go out and engage in public life and have jobs, where they do interact with males, but if they don’t need to be around males then they choose not to be. 

As a woman who wear the hijab, i despise the idea of someone thinking that i am oppressed when that is far from the truth. That is not to say that there aren’t women out there who are being forced because there are and that is what i call oppression. But it is not fair to generalise this to all Muslim women as this is not the case for everyone. 

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Motifs of the kantha are deeply influenced by religious belief and culture, each motif has a different meaning behind it within each relgion/belief. Even though no specific strict symmetry is followed, a finely embroidered  kantha will always have a focal point. Most kanthas will have a lotus as focal point, and around the lotus there are often undulating vines or floral motifs, or a shari border motif. The motifs may include images of flower and leaves, birds and fish, animals, kithen forms even toilet articles.

While most kantas have some initial pattern, no two kantas are same. While traditional motifs are repeated, the individual touch is used in the variety of stitches, colours and shapes. 

After looking at the different motifs and what each of them means, I know that i have to think more carefully about which designs i use as it can completely change the meaning behind my work. For example, the lotus motif is a symbol of cosmic harmony and essential womanhood, so this would be a great motif to use within my work as my work centres around women. 

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Kantha or embroidered quilt is made and used almost everywhere in Bangladesh. It’s something that almost every single bengali household has, even if they don’t live in bangladesh. Kanthas of Rajshahi, Jessore, and Faridpur are most famous for stitchcraft and picturesque designs. This is an old tradition that has come from the poor people in Bangladesh, since they couldn’t afford new clothes, they would layer up their old, torn clothes until it was thick enough. Then the women would seperate the thread from their old clothes so they could sew the pattern. This then started to become popular and eventually it became commercialised. Apart from being used to make bedspreads and quilts, nakshi kantha work is also used to make pillow cases and covers, prayer mats, seats for puja, small bags for keeping mirrors and combs, gilaf (covers) for books, covers for foods, and dastarkhan or dining mats. 

The designs were traditionally drawn free hand by women who worked leisurely in their spare time. At present much nakshi kantha work is done by machines and handicraft organisations for commercial purposes. Common motifs are the lotus, the sun, the moon, stars, leaves, trees, flowering creepers, human figures, deities, horses, elephants, fish, and birds. Elaborately embroidered quilts depict scenes from mythology or contemporary life.  At present embroidery thread is used or skeins of yarn.

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Alpana is probably the oldest surviving indigenous practice in folk painting. It means painting floral motifs and intricate designs on a courtyard or on a long stretch of road during weddings and festivals. This is something I have seen for myself when my uncle got married in Bangladesh. One person would draw out the inital design with chalk on the courtyard floor and after that the rest of the women gathered around with pots, filled with brightly coloured powder. They would then fill in the gaps with the powder. The design would usually be quite large and specific to the event. Wall painting and wood carvings are two other oldest forms. But alpana has not just survived, it has grown exponentially to the extent that it has become a part and parcel of many national celebrations. Traditionally, they drew out the design with a small piece of cloth soaked in a solution of grinned rice. It is likely that alpana designs were originally drawn by spreading white rice powder or by drawing lines on a layer of this powder.

Ingredients used in such drawings mainly consist of rice-powder, rice-paste diluted in water, dry colour powders produced from dried leaves, charcoal, burnt earth etc. Alpana is generally done on the floor and on the wall or ceiling, this immediately reminded me of cave paintings. Womenfolk of Bengal have been using these designs for religious and ceremonial purposes. Hindu women draw out these designs more often during religious festivals, to brighten up their homes.

The designs in alpana folk art are very similar to the Islamic Geometric designs i have looked at previously. Another thing they have in common is the fact that symmetry plays a big part in the designs, this gives them a utilitarian aspect.  Motifs used in alpana are: sun, rice stem, owl, ladder, plough, leg of goddess Laksmi, fish, betel leafs, lotus, shankhalata, container of sindur kauta etc.  Circular alpana is used as a holy pedestal in the time of worshipping a deity, especially in the case of Laksmipuja.

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Looking deeper into Bengali Folk art, I was quite surprised to learn that there is so much that goes into it. I assumed it was just a style of painting, but there is so much more to it, floor and wall paintings or kantha are included in folk art while products with art on it are considered to be craft. However, some folk arts can’t be categorised separately, for example a pot on which anything in nature or fish has been painted on are considered both art and handicraft.  Folk art has no commercial value, its made by people to satisfy their religious, social and aesthetic needs. 

One thing that angered me, but didnt really surprise me was the fact that previously, any folk art made my women wasn’t commercial so they made no money, but the art made by men did have a commercial value. Even the needelwomen who made kantha designs, never got paid for the work. To this day men still get paid more for doing the same job as a woman, this seems to be a first and third world problem.  

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Since i have decided to look more into my culture and incorporate that into my artwork, I thought it would be a good idea to look at artists who painted in the traditional South Asian style. There aren’t many artists who continue to paint in this style (not any that i can find anyways), the only one i can find so far are a lot older. 

Roy is one of them, he was one of the earliest and most significant  modernists of Indian art. A lot of his paintings were in Western styles, like portraiture and impressionism, however, influenced by the growing surge of nationalism, Roy consciously rejected Western artistic styles and searched for a more 'Indian' form of artistic expression. His work included many different subjects and motifs, from calligraphy, to animals, to relgious art. Even though Roy went with South Asian iconography and subject matter, he added his own unique modernist style with graphic lines.  From 1920 onwards, Roy’s work represented scenes from village life, reflecting the innocence and romanticism of the rural environment. Roy did a series of paintings featuring Santal women, he painted them with firm angular lines, the artworks show the women engaged in their daily chores.

He later experimented with a simplistic visual style. His images for the most part became monochromatic – a play of white, soft grey and black. With a masterly control of the brush, he created contours with fluid, calligraphic lines.

What i love the most about his work is that he worked with two different styles, to create unique and complex pieces of work. I have always been interested in using two different mediums to create a piece of work, but i have never actually loked at trying to make work by using two different artistic painting styles. This is something that i want to explore further, especially since i want to incorporate South Asian art within my work, so i will need to find the perfect balance.

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Atul has produced a body of work that defies neat categorization, ranging from paintings and works on paper to street art and sculptures, encompassing numerous different styles and seamlessly intertwining Western art history with the history, myths, folklore, and popular culture of India. Atul was born and bred in Mumbai, the city’s incredible diversity has had a huge influence on him and his work.

Atul came to prominence in the early 1990s for his hyperrealist depictions of middle-class Indian life and his exuberant paintings on the security shutters of shops throughout Mumbai. Recently, he has paid homage to the marginalized and the poor in a series of exquisitely sensitive watercolors depicting, for example, a plumber, a scribe, or a painter.

For a South Asian living in a western country, i dont really know a lot about my own country. At one point i even rejected it, to fit in better because you would hardly see South Asians being represented in films, magazines or even art, so i thought i had to be more western to look good and be normal. In recent years i have started to fully embrace my culture and want to learn more about my parents homeland rich history. For me, looking at artwork that represents this is the best way for me to learn because i feel like you can gain a real sense of what it is was like and thats what i feel like when looking at Atul’s work. 

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Hassani is one of the first Afghanni female graffiti artists, she makes very loud, powerful, colourful pieces of art of women in a male dominant society, basically giving men the middle finger and showing that women are their equals. 

Using the walls of abandoned buildings damaged from bombs as her canvases, Hassani paints murals that often depict women in traditional clothing joyfully posing with musical instruments. Her aim is to beautify the city with color amid the darkness of war. The fact that she’s a woman going into the streets to paint, where it’s dangerous just to walk alone outdoors in Kabul — she’s so fierce and independent and strong. She’s giving women in Afghanistan a voice, showing them that they can live a different life. 

I love looking at artists such as Hassani because she is inspiring a whole genertaion of young girls through her work and it just goes to show how important and powerful art can be. 

The bright, rich colours she uses within her work make it very hard to miss, especially since the surroundings are dull and depressing. Due to the war it is has been very hard for people to live a normal life, especially for women, who have been so restricted. Hassani incorporates her culture within her work with the dresses her subjects wear, this allows the women of Afghan to relate to women in the art work, seeing other women who look and dress like them living normal lives. 

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Zarina was known predominantly as a printmaker, being born in India, her art poignantly chronicles her life and features recurring themes of home, displacement, borders, journey, and memory.  Her work was often autobiographical in that it was informed by her identity as a Muslim woman in a minority community following the Partition of India. These themes of relocation and exile are demonstrated by her vocabulary of “maps, abstract geometries, stark lines and a muted palette. The beautiful simplicity of her works reinforces the emotion and politics that motivated them. Moving past her ancestry as a Muslim-born Indian woman, her art also references various international cities that she has called home through the years. Such works include floor plans and maps of cities like Paris and New York.

As a south Asian myself, i dont really know much about the war and the partition. It is not something that my family really talk about or many of the elders in our community as they are memories that they do not like to talk about for obvious reasons. The war caused many families to be displaced and many have never returned to their original land because of the partition. Even within my own family there has been so much displacement, my father was born before the partition, so he was techinally born in india. Whereas my mother was born in East Pakistan, now known as Bangladesh. So looking at artists such as Zarina who talk about their own experinece during the partition gives me an insight of what it could’ve been like for my own parents and an insight into my cultural history. 

Zarina prefers to carve instead of drawing the lines in her work, to gouge the surface rather than build it up. She uses various mediums of printmaking, including intaglio, woodblocks, lithography, and silkscreen. For example, her seminal work Home is Foreign Place, consists of 36 woodblock prints, each representing a particular memory of home. Inscribed with an Urdu word, each print further alludes to the vital role language plays in Zarina’s work, paying homage to her mother tongue. 

I have mentioned previoiusly that i would like to explore my own culture within my work and after looking at Zarina’s work and how beautifully she has incorporated her heritage within her work, i am even more determined to explore this particular theme. 

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Ali is a Birmingham based artist and printmaker. There were a few things that drew me to her work. The first was that she was female Muslim artist, who also wears the hijab, just like me. Its such a nice feeling, seeing other people who look and dress like me, working in the art industry because I haven’t seen many who do. She was also one of few people who hijab at her university, which made her create work regarding her culture so that she could have something to relate to. 

The second was that the themes running through her work are very similar to mine, she explores cultural themes and occasionally explores political circumstances. Ali aims to not only educate herself through her work, but her auidence too. This made me think a lot about my own work because as i started to create work about Muslim women, i also started looking at more south asian artists and it has taught me a LOT about my own country and culture. For instance i didn’t even know there was a Bengal famine until i researched south asain artists and came across Chittaprosad Bhattacharya who documented the bengal famine. I actually felt quite embarrassed and shocked that i didn’t know about an event that had such a huge impact on Bangladesh and even on my own grandparents who would’ve definately experienced the effects of the famine and even my own parents would would’ve experineced the after effects of it. Learning this solidifed my decison in making sure i explored my own culture and religion within my work because if it wasn’t for the work Chittaprosad, i doubt that i ever would’ve learned about the Bengal famine and i realised how important it is to tell your own story and making sure others hear it too. 

Ali prefers to work with more traditional forms of art, such as oil painting and lino prints. A series that she created with her prints was geometrical Islamic patterns, something that i have been looking into myself. I actually never thought to do these patterns on lino, as i usually draw them out and paint them. However, this process is very time consuming, where as doing prints will most definately speed up the process. I have always loved to use mix media within my artwork, so using lino prints with my oil painitngs is something i would like to explore. 

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Alia Romagnoli is a half Indian and half Italian photographer and art director whose international upbringing affected her photography in the best way. Specializing in fashion and portraiture, Alia uses photography as a medium to explore her own queer identity and biracial background.  A lot of her work now is inspired by different types of Indian architecture, textiles, and embroidery because it is very rich and specific to certain regions. What really drove her was colour, and the different meanings that each colour has in Inida, especially in Hinduism- for example you would wear white to a funeral and in Indian weddings everyone wears colourful outfits and the bride wears red. 

The models she uses within her work are ‘normal people’, they’re not the usual types of models that you would find in magazines or on the runway, this is because she wants to show a side to normla people that you dont usually see. She wants us to see the beauty in normal things/people and not only in the models we see on the runways. This is something that really resonated with me and my work because i want to show a different side to Muslim women, i want to show that we are just as normal as any other woman. 

As well as using colour within her work, Alia also uses a lot flowers, this is something else from her time living in India that has influenced her work. In Hinduism there are many festivals and relgious days and it was quite common for every household to have flower arrangements in their houses and even the shops were filled with flowers. I love how Alia’s mixed heritage is so evident within her work, she has models dressed in western atire, whilst their arms are filled with floral henna tattoos- it’s the perfect mix. 

Growing up in a South Asian family, Alia was expected to go into a more traditional career route such as finance or medicine. This was something i could relate to because the same thing was expected of me and many of my family members were very confused as to why i would pick a subject that has ‘0 job opportunites’. So i felt like i could really relate to her as an artist. 

The way she has integrated her mixed heritage within her work is amazing and has got me thinking about how I should show Muslim women living in the western world. My goal is to get people to get a different viewpoint of Muslim women and for Muslim women to look at my work and be able to relate to the subject within my work. However, i feel like if i showed my subjects in a more western setting then non-Muslim women could also relate to it and see that there isn’t much of a difference between Muslim and non-Muslim women. I think this is definately something that i would like to explore at a later time. 

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As my work is about Muslim women and their lives, i thought i should also look at Muslim female artists and the work they created. The research i have been doing into Muslim female artists has actually really surprised me because i never realised how many there were. Even when i look back at previous artists there are so many Muslim female artists. I love looking at their work and being able to relate to it and to them also. 

Nasreen is an indian artist best known for her line-based drawings, and is today considered one of the most essential modern artists from India, she is also one of a handful of Muslim women to first establish a professional artistic career in India and beyond. Over the last decade her work has recieved great critical acclaim internationally, despite being relatively unknown outside of her native country during her lifetime.  She explored various mediums such as sketches, canvas based watercolour and oils to pencil and graphite, her preferred medium of work was pencil and paper.

In 1970 she began drawing vertical and diagonal lines across horizontal registers, creating complex illusions of spatial rhythms. Mohamedi’s break into geometric abstraction was sudden, especially in India, where modern art was mostly figurative. Her work is clearly self-referential and personal – with particular pathos, as she suffered from Huntington’s disease and struggled to draw with precision. Any resemblance to ‘Western’ minimalism seems to be coincidental. 

I was quite drawn to her more geometrical designs as this is something that i have grown quite an interest in and have incorporated in my work. After looking at her work and her abstract style, i have thought that maybe this is something that i could incorporate into my own work, as my work is very neat and precise. I want to try a more looser and abstract style to chnage up my work and give it more character. 

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Moheeni Paul is a highly recognised contemporary artist. Along with illustrating her mandala prints, Moheeni teaches henna inspired art on various surfaces encouraging others to turn this timeless and ancient art into stylish designs for home décor. Heavily influenced by both her Indian and British heritage, she incorporates the rich and diverse colours, geometric designs found within south Asian art, within her own artwork. As a passionate enthusiast of therapeutic art for mindfulness, Moheeni continues to share her creative and entrepreneurial experiences through her courses for aspiring artists and for those fascinated in challenging their imagination.

What I love about her work is how you can immediately tell that her work has been influenced by south Asian culture. The henna and mandala designs that are within her work are very common in South Asian culture. This is something that I want within my work, I want people to look at it and be able to tell that the work is about Muslims. My work is mainly portraits of Muslim women, but recently I have started to incorporate Islamic art in the background to make my work look more eye catching and to add more context to my work as well.

Looking at Moheeni’s work has influenced me to maybe think about incorporating the culture of my subject within my work, to show off their culture as well as their religion. I want my work to celebrate Muslim woman and that also includes their culture.

When I first started this theme within my work I started off slowly, by just painting Muslim women at first with plain backgrounds and then started with the Islamic art in the background and I think maybe now it’s time for me to go a little deeper and incorporate culture within my work too. I know that trying to include art from different cultures can be a difficult as each culture has its own deep, rich history, so I won’t be able to look at many women from different cultural backgrounds. For now I think I will look at one culture and their art and then expand from there.