Indian artist and participant of Garage Field Research program Afrah Shafiq will discuss how a playful approach to research can transform artistic practice and how archival materials define the final form of an artwork.
For over a decade, Afrah Shafiq’s multidisciplinary practice has evolved through experimentation across various media and forms of viewer engagement: from video games and interactive websites to sculptures and textile objects that take the form of glass mosaic pieces fitted with custom LED-matrix animation (The Language of Tears, 2023) or game-based installations (Sultana’s Reality, 2024).
The themes of her artworks span such diverse phenomena as women’s domestic labor, the social structure of ant colonies, and illustrated children’s books. Shafiq’s practice draws on her own methodology of “research as play, ” where the form of a work emerges in response to the material, and the process of its creation serves as a means for understanding the world.
During the talk, the artist will reflect on her methodology using examples from her current and past projects. Nobody Knows for Certain (2020–2024), developed with the support of Garage Field Research, grew out of Shafiq’s interest in Soviet book publishing in foreign languages, particularly those of the Indian subcontinent (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam, and others), where generations of readers and collectors grew up in the 1960s–1980s on illustrated Soviet fairy tales and popular science books for children. Having assembled a digital archive of such books and studied the history of the Soviet book export phenomenon, the artist came up with the idea of creating a digital work in the form of a narrative point-and-click game, which tells the story through the adventures of recognizable fairy-tale heroines (Baba Yaga, Princess Nesmeyana) and characters created by the artist (Indian girl Katya, the Cat Without a Tail, and the Empty Matryoshka). The visual style of each level references the aesthetic sources of Soviet children’s book illustrations: from lacquer miniatures and the textile and decorative arts to avant-garde and constructivist imagery.
The first part of the game Nobody Knows for Certain was released in 2023 and is available on the Garage Digital platform.
