Asuf Ishaq Interview | Mother
What was your initial inspiration for the project ‘Mother’?
In my MFA [Master of Fine Arts] research, I have been exploring themes of migration, representation of experience, story telling, trauma, and diasporic body as an archive. My inspiration was to look closer to at my own family’s migration experience. A few years ago my mother gave me a damaged and torn photograph of her young self-taken in Pakistan, she asking me to repair it. I didn’t manage to find time to work on it. So the lockdown in March I re-discovered the photograph and began working on it. This project gave me an opportunity to collaborate with my mother. And the process resulted in a 16 minutes film, which is a combination of film, sound and archive and new photographs.
When did you first hear from your mother about her experience of immigrating to the UK?
Migration experience of my mother and father is always ubiquitous, but not vocalised or communicated directly. Traumas and memories are difficult to talk about. There are some moments when stories are communicated, especially vivid and impactful ones, for example a story about a harrowing river boat crossing to Kashmir. Photographs communicate the moment too, for example of photographs at Trafalgar Square of mum and dad, and standing in front of a bed of flowers at the local in Birmingham. These photograph represent the excitement, optimism and achievements. The body is also an archive, containing narratives, and evidence of experiences, something like the hennah (Mehndi) on mums hair, hands and feet, worn today just as she was taught to wear by her mother and grandmother in Pakistan. Memory in the body is communicated in it’s own way. I do think the migration experience of my parents is passed down to us their children.
I love the process of you digitally repairing an old photograph with your mother watching. We are now so used to taking hundreds of pictures on our phones and the fact that we could stare at a single shot for hours feels so out-dated. It felt like looking at artwork rather than a snapshot in time. We are also so used to the photo shopping of images, using filters, all this is so humdrum now and has a lot of negative connotations but you fixing this image for your mum was an act of love and respect. When did it occur to you in this process that there was a story there that you wanted to capture?
You are correct, today we have huge number of digital photographs on our devices, and our relationship with photographs is a new. In my film I explore an old 35mm film photograph, format and it’s materiality. I explore and looking at it, a sort of forensic search, asking for the photograph to speak to me. My idea was to make a long form film work, keep a slow pace and rhythm to the film. I could have made it much longer. I mix documentary genre with new created film footage, and recently taken photographs of the house. By overlapping time and place, I create a new context and viewpoint. My intention was to create time and space for a conversation with my mother.
We don’t see the finished fixed pictures. Why not?
My intention in this film was to involve my mother into the work I was going to make, and show her the technology I work with, techniques I use to make my artwork. Together we unravel the past, it is about repair but not in the literal sense, but also an emotional repair.
During the process, my mother did say, “It does not matter if you can not repair, at least you can see the faces”. I think the repair of the photograph goes beyond this art work, the repair of the photograph may still happen.
I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about healing and care especially after the year we have all just lived through collectively. Was this project healing for you?
It has certainly been healing process for my mother and me, it was very special to collaborate and involve her into my reality. Working as an artist for many years, my mother doesn’t quite understand what I do, or I never stopped and explained in detail. I enjoyed introducing my artwork to my mother, the filmmaking, working on the computer, manipulating photography, filming, and sound recording. It was much about the shared past experience, as it is of sharing new experiences, ultimately understanding more about each other.
In the video you subtitle some of the foreign languages but then a large chunk of the conversation with your mum is not translated. It leaves the viewer hanging and reminds us that we can never fully understand another language when translated. How does language feature in your work and what does it mean to you?
The non-translated part of the film was to illustrate the vulnerability and disorientation one feels, this was intentional. By not using subtitles, it emphasis the experience of lack of control my mother experienced. Growing up as children we use to take on the role as interpreters for my mother, I use to speak for her at hospital, GP appointments and in shops. It’s a tribute to our relationship with language, connected and dependent. In my film I employ the languages we have in our home, classical Arabic for pray, Punjabi which we speak together, and English as an overarching language amongst us siblings, and occasionally speaking with our father. I weave all the languages and narratives in the film, with voice and text.
You filmed your mum praying and also joined in the prayer. This is such a vulnerable moment. Can you expand on your choice of including this in the video?
I film my mother praying because it’s an important part of her, a constant and stable though her life. I joined in with the pray for a short moment, it’s a re-enactment of me learning the pray, as I would as a child. We haven’t done this for many years. I recorded my narration separately and then added it to the composition. It’s an acknowledgment of a language we don’t understand but have closeness as our faith. I mention in my narration, my mothers pray voice is a like a lullaby for me, since we have heard it all our lives.
In another video you explore your mum using tape letters to communicate with family in Pakistan. I find the concept of tape recordings so fascinating as they seem so out-dated now but actually it is so similar to recording a voice note on WhatsApp, for example. Are elders still using tapes to communicate?
Yes ‘Tape Letters’ is a different film work, I am still developing, but I have already made a piece where it’s an re-enactment of my mother recording a voice letter on tape cassettes to her family back in Kashmir. This was popular form of communication in the 1960’s and 70’s, most diaspora communities did this, as it was cheaper than telephone calls, which were quick, with tape voice recordings, one could speak for much longer. In some rural locations in Pakistan there were no telephone connections available. A friend or a family member would deliver the tape. This film work I want to develop further, you can view this on my website www.asufishaq.net
Did you listen to any of your family’s tape letters? What did you learn?
There are no tapes in our family but there are many tape letter archives of Pakistani Kashmiri migrants, at the Bishopsgate Institute in London, which I would like to explore, tape letters in the form of love letters, or messages to parents, sisters, brothers etc. By making a film about my own mother’s experience, I bring to life this practice voice messages. In the re-enactment my mother was speaking to her mother, father sister, brother back in Kashmir. It was a voice of the past to people in the past some who are no longer alive. I am fascinated in the past technologies and the role they played in connecting people, the intimate moment with the slowly turning tape in a cassette.
Find out more about Asuf Ishaq’s work here:
www.asufishaq.net
Mother
https://asufishaq.net/Mother-2020-Film
Tape Letters
https://asufishaq.net/Tape-Letters-2020-HD-film
