Raisa Kabir

Fabric of Society - Glasgow international 2021

 

 

Fabric of society at The Deep End as part of Glasgow International til June 27th. 

My work NO PROTECTION 2020 takes on new meanings amid the pandemic and is a collective protest and call to the endemic failing to protect queer trans disabled people from harm.

I feel honoured and privileged to have created this space and exhibition with @rabiyachoudhry @_jasleen.kaur_ and @raeyensong and with production with @morvyc

This is an exhibition about family, othered cultures, imagined ancestry and the power of documenting our own families. It is about loss, hope and the transformative action to do the work on yourself towards ending cycles of intergenerational trauma. What does it mean to Mother as a verb, as an action?

This rug gun tufted piece is about disability, queerness, dysfunction and inability to process unspeakable things that were inherited trauma. This piece is about mourning all the times we were failed by those who were meant to protect us from harm. A collective voice a personal action...

I feel so empowered making this work and getting to work as a collective with Fabric of Society, four diasporic artists of colour. The exhibition and works were site specific and work as one and reference each other in a very magical way as well as standing alone. We chose to exhibit in a non hierarchical space in a non institutional space in Glasgow Southside.

Photos by Tiu Makkonen

AMBI - Center of Contemporary Art Glasgow 7th - 29th MAY

Gather your spools, let your hair down for me. Gently. Here. Undo
Raisa Kabir 2021

As part CCA Glasgow’s current exhibition, ambi, Raisa Kabir presents her new moving portrait and sculpture work responding to the textile geographies of labour between Kashmiri woven shawls, Paisley, Scotland, textile archives, and South Asian diasporic migration and displacement.  The sculptural weaving, which features in the moving portrait, acts as a consequent reminder of the colonial imposed borders and the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan.

To view the film please visit this link https://cca-annex.net/entry/gather-your-spools-let-your-hair-down-for-me-gently-here-undo/

 

“The performance in the moving portrait is a kind of queer ‘drag’ embodying South Asian narratives projected on to the brown femme body in this way. A performed orientalised fantasy of the craft labour/er. I challenge the viewer to look at me and ask what I am doing. As this weaver doesn’t really exist in any land or geography. Like a colonial archive, the labour and craft of the weaving is divorced from the body, and place of origin, its land, the weaver, the patterns.  Like much of my work, I reveal textiles as intimately connected to the resistance of displaced peoples, and the connections made across movements, histories, british empire and ongoing occupation resulting from imperial histories. The moving portrait is set in an idea of nature, untethering the land and geography in relation to the crafted labour of Paisley designs, where the woven shawls originated in Kashmir, and the motif is found across textiles spanning the northwestern region of South Asia up into Afghanistan and Punjab. 

The body of this craft labour/er has been displaced. I, performing these weaving actions, with these materials, in this place, am creating a fantasy based on the mythology of this weaver. There is no recreation. It aims to challenge the viewer to reexamine the histories placed on, or erased around the provenance of textiles and textile patterns. How this is intimately connected to border violence and colonial borders in that region, where decimated textile heritages and continuation of hand weaving brocade shawls has declined, and how that is linked to Scottish and British interaction, and the consumption of paisley patterned cloth divorced from the Boteh.” — Raisa Kabir

The title of the exhibition, ambi, is Punjabi for the pattern known in Scotland as Paisley Pattern. ambi also means ‘both’, allowing for multiple narratives and acknowledging that these works from the archive have diverse origins and appropriations.

This exhibition, a partnership between CCA and GSA, takes works from the textiles, fashion and costume holdings at The Glasgow School of Art Archives & Collections as its starting point. The GSA has specially commissioned four Scotland and UK-based artists and designers Rabiya Choudhry, Fiona Jardine, Raisa Kabir and Hanneline Visnes. Each responds to specific textiles holdings or the archive in order to track its histories in order to present a new story or work from it.

This film work can be viewed on CCA Annex until the end of the exhibition on Saturday 29 May.

 

 

Indian Art Fair 2020 - Indigo, Jute, Linen

Raisa Kabir: নীল. Nil. Nargis. Blue. Bring in the Tide With Your Moon

1 February 2020

2pm — 6pm, Outside the Auditorium, India Art Fair Grounds

 

 

নীল. Nil. Nargis. Blue. Bring in the Tide With Your Moon is a durational performance which will see Raisa Kabir dye linen and jute in natural indigo which is native to India. Making references to the historical connections between India and Scotland, the performance will shed light on the anxieties around globalised neo-colonial textile production and nationhood.

Raisa Kabir is an interdisciplinary artist, who utilises woven textiles, sound, video and performance to translate and visualise concepts concerning the politics of cloth, labour and embodied geographies. She addresses cultural anxieties surrounding nationhood, textile identities and the cultivation of borders; as well as examining the encoded violence in histories of labour in globalised neo-colonial textile production. Her weaving performances comment on power, production, disability and the body as a living archive of collective trauma. Kabir has participated in residencies and exhibited work internationally at The Whitworth, The Tetley, Raven Row, Cove Park, Textile Arts Center NYC, and the Center for Craft Creativity and Design U.S. Kabir has lectured on her research on South Asian textile cultures at Tate Modern, Institute of Contemporary Art London, London College of Fashion, The Courtauld, Royal College of Art, Manchester School of Art and Edinburgh College of Art.

https://indiaartfair.in/programme/raisa-kabir-%E0%A6%A8%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%B2-nil-nargis-blue-bring-in-the-tide-with-your-moon

Weaving Residency - Oaxaca Mexico

 

 

 

 

 

The Politics of Cloth on South Asian Queer and Trans bodies. A collaboration between Raju Rage and Raisa Kabir

"There is More at Stake Than Just 3 metres of Cloth."

 

Communicating the transitions and migrations of turbans from North India/ Panjab via East Africa to Britain, Raisa Kabir weaving on a loom, crafting cloth conceptually created by Raju Rage, who ‘performed’ embodying this cloth, with their complex migration narratives, on their non-conforming queer-transgender body.

(weaving loom, projection, images, text, sculptural objects, soundscape, cloth)

Link to Raju Rage's artist site here, to see more of their work

 

Some details of the turban being woven...

“Binding the sari: the politics of space, dress and the brown, queer femme body”

Abstract for “Binding the sari: the politics of space, dress and the brown, queer femme body” 

"South Asian Queer femme women, because of the way racialized gender is culturally coded as heterosexual are often rendered invisible –  partly because of their feminine presentation, as many femmes will attest, but more so because of the way their gender and ethnicity are inextricably linked and defined by others.  Their queer authenticity repeatedly questioned, and their sexuality framed only when in proximity to a visibly queer presenting person or occupying a LGBTQ space, and even then their entry into those spaces may be denied.
  

Dress is an integral component in building visible connections to various aspects of a cultural identity, such as identifying with a youth culture, expressing one's gender or sexuality, and sometimes an ethnic identity attached to diasporic roots.  We know that dress can equally be instrumental in the construction of queer identity, though popular representations of queer identity and culture are often implicitly racialized as White, while 'authentic' queer identity is visually represented with Eurocentric formations of queer masculinity, or femininity.

Through examining the use of dress as a tool to resist these norms of Eurocentricity and heterosexuality, we can highlight the ways race, gender, culture and sexuality are ascribed to particular bodies in particular spaces, and how radical dress can affect the visibility of South Asian femme women in relation to public/private space. A different look at racialised representations of queer femininity, and the making or (un)making of gendered ethnicity. This piece begins to investigate the role of ethnic and queer femme performativity in constructing racialized queer femininity. Through visual case studies and interviews, it explores the intrinsic relationships between dress, identity, and culture in the formation of South Asian queer femme identity." Raisa Kabir

VISIBLE SPACE: REFLECTIONS ON THE REALM OF DIMENSIONAL AFFECT, SPACE AND THE QUEER RACIALISED SELF

 

The private view is on the 15th April and th exhibition opens the day after 16th April. More info at http://www.in-visiblespace.co.uk/ and the listing on the Richmix website is here

Trying Not to Erase Myself - The Body Narratives

 

Orignally published on The Body Narratives.

Trying not to erase myself –

Raisa Kabir

 

I had wished I had been White my whole life. Yet it was a desire so latent, I could not articulate, speak of, or even let my tongue touch the words. It was a desire cut so deep it took years to excavate that embedded, stony knife. 

I hated being brown, and I hated being associated with it - it wasn’t Raisa. It wasn’t me. As a teenager I flinched and felt uncomfortable when anyone pointed race out to me. I strived to separate myself from what being “British Asian Bangladeshi” meant in this country – poor, working class, uneducated, oppressed, strict parents, religious – And in doing so I, an unaware teenager, was propagating racism. Internalized or otherwise.

 

“Other” kind of Brown

 

Voiceless imagery of the veil feeds dehumanization and appropriation in popular culture

Cultural and visual media do not happen in vacuums, and the deeper connotations behind these islamophobic images, expresses how western society positions Muslim women. 

A Muslim woman wearing a Niqab walks in the British northern town of Blackburn, 2006 Getty Images.

 Unemployment rife, our welfare state is being ravaged and the numbers that are turning to food banks is steadily rising. Creating an aversion by picking on Muslim women is easy political fodder; though the practice of a minuscule, minority of women being disproportionately portrayed as a pressing issue was achieved quite successfully, in part because of the imagery used.

Over the past two weeks we’ve seen the stock images of voiceless and nameless Muslim women on the front covers of newspapers and blogs in the UK, wearing the niqab. The wearing of a piece of cloth, in schools, hospitals and courtrooms, is suddenly a contentious issue; “Ban the veil!” we hear newspapers cry.  

This contemporary dialogue obviously affects Muslim women here in the UK; it stokes our political climate of Islamophobia, with revived EDL marches, and creates legitimacy in attacking visibly Muslim women and communities. Though wider global narratives cannot be ignored, neither can popular visual culture. Cultural and visual media do not happen in vacuums, and the deeper connotations behind these islamophobic images, expresses how western society positions Muslim women.

The representation of women who wear the niqab, or burqa in prominent media is important in justifying these politics, but we can recognise, that they are themselves a byproduct of the imperialism from the past decade, revalidating racist ideology. Where actual Muslim women are derided as oppressed, uneducated and divorced from western society, this loaded garment and symbol of “oppression” is being co-opted in fashion, ready to be consumed.

visible/invisibility