Portfolio
2023
Husna Farooqui
Damma
(2023)
A single damma spray-painted over.
At Bathurst St. Bridge near Stackt Market. With Kunn Collective.
Peace Lovers in Exile Burning Fest
(2023)
A self-hosted and conceptualized annual
party/ gathering/
feast/
co-op
symposium/
auto-theatre
with all fanfare.
Since 2022, guests have received invites (typically outlandish) and a theme. This year saw Natura Morta.
The hope,
motive &,
grounds
sustaining the
fest &
what guests are asked each year
is simply
to (joyously) celebrate being alive together!
come what may.
2023 was documented on Super8 film to be repurposed.
The same basic tracking shot of guests are to be filmed yearly, and the end is similarly repeated. The guests are the present family or friends joining for dinner. Each year’s cut gets adjoined to the last, etc.
The footage will be used for a film project yet to be titled, and the expected completion is after a lifetime.
A first film to be a last film, something I always approximately finish, but only someone else can know is complete—
like an infinite series along which I count step by step
whereas
someone else calculates the limit, finds the sum, and knows the end.
A girl dines with her guests. All of it—the affair—elaborately arranged, still somehow she loses her ring.
So she asks the guest next to her whether they have seen it and they to the one seated next to them and then they to the other and so on. No one has seen it.
At the other end of the table sits someone reminiscent; she is older. In fact, many guests on that side are aged.
The odd resemblances surface: a face reappears maybe everywhere, maybe a few times then never again, or maybe not at all. As if—how many times can a face make itself?
And the ring...
party sounds, cheers, raised hands.
(On the span of a life, the people who are a part of its fabric, etc.)
What Have You To Confess
(2022) VR Concept Demo
The internet as a confessional booth.
A relation to philosopher, Byung-Chul Han:
“Confession obtained by force has been replaced by voluntary disclosure.”
“We keep going to confession. We undress by choice. But we don’t ask for forgiveness: instead, we call out for attention.”
“Smartphones represent digital devotion - indeed they are the devotional objects of the Digital, period. As a subjectivation-apparatus, the smartphone works like a rosary - which, because of its ready availability, represents a handheld device too. Both the smartphone and the rosary serve the purpose of self-monitoring and control. Power operates more effectively when it delegated surveillance to discrete individuals. Like is the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. The smartphone is not just an effective surveillance apparatus; it is also a mobile confessional. Facebook is the church - the global synagogue (literally, ‘assembly’) of the Digital.”
But still another way
What Have You To Confess
by choice, by want, by need
?
or?
When every feature, behavior, word, look, mined datum
has the potential to reveal
what is a confession beyond being just as one is?
In a call to nowhere or to anywhere,
can we regain presumed losses?
Or within the scope of this freedom, do we face the impenetrability of interiority?
Could it be smashed and entered?
Could the interior be a territory understood, mapped,
known?
The deepest depth of a self
where even one cannot see oneself,
the loneliest part of 24 hours, great fear,
does it defend us?
Emergency Loop
(2021)
Silent version without Shepard tone.
My Sorrow is Luminous
(2021)
“My Sorrow is Luminous” refers to the English translation title of «Печаль моя светла» by Siberian punk-poet-songwriter Янка Дягилева (Yanka Dyagileva). With depressed phrases such as «почему жить если завтра умерать», these 6 panels became a flawed, fragmented flight into another language at the beginning of learning while meaning still swirls and foments trying to constitute itself.
Extracting this pattern to the landscape of human experience, our encounters with fragmented meaning(s) and the project to construct them becomes reflected: yes, sorrowful, luminous.
دادی ماں
Guardian (2021)
نگہبان
© 2023 Copyright Husna Farooqui.