Arshia Haq

The Ascension, 2018

 

Arshia Haq

The Ascension, 2018

Single channel video, 14:42

 

The Ascension is a 2018 performance in which the artist gilds an ice sculpture as it melts. The frozen statue is of the Buraq, a winged creature with the head of a woman and the body of a horse. While said to have been the mount of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad and other prophets, the Buraq is not mentioned explicitly in the Quran, and lives on through folklore and indigenous mythology, which Haq sees as “sites of resistance to fundamentalism and orthodoxy, sites of richness, imagination, and power in counterpoint to austerity and control.”

 

While the performance and video comment on the futility of the human desire to fix or make permanent the ineffable and divine, the fragility and ephemerality at the heart of the piece relates equally to the vulnerability of nature to human action, whatever feelings of veneration or devotion people may intend. 

 

Arshia Fatima Haq (b. 1977, Hyderabad, India) works across film, visual art, performance, and sound, through counter-archives and speculative narratives. She is currently exploring themes of indigenous and localized knowledge within the context of Sufism. Her projects have been featured at the Broad Museum and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, MoMA in New York, Onassis Stegi in Athens, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and more. Haq is the founder of Discostan, a collaborative club-based project, radio show, and record label, drawing from the cultural production of South and West Asia and North Africa and their diasporas. 

 

Performance concept: Arshia Haq

Film direction: Cassils

Editing: Arshia Haq and Cassils

DP: Alison Kelly

Sound: Kadet Kuhne