AFRAH SHAFIQ

SULTANA’S REALITY

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This project responds to UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 5: Gender Equality

Following an Alice in Wonderland style adventure, Sultana’s Reality is stitched together with written accounts of different women, who would rather nap than read. Those who were stoned in the streets for wearing shoes and carrying umbrellas, those who read forbidden texts in secret at night, and those who went on to write books, telling their story in their own words. This web-story by Afrah Shafiq, is told through an animated potpourri of digital art forms made by collating, re-mixing, reinterpreting and reimagining traditional visual imaginations of the visual form.

THIS WORK IS SUPPORTED BY

India Foundation of the Arts

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ABOUT AFRAH SHAFIQ

In 2016 she moderated a panel titled W in V on the female form in videogames and new media today by the EyeMyth Festival of new media and visual arts (Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo, and Unbox Festival Delhi) in Mumbai. In 2015 she was awarded an Archival and Museum fellowship by the India Foundation
for the Arts. Her work was also selected as part the first edition of Gender Bender a group-show hosted by Sandbox Collective and Max Mueller Bhavan. Her web-comic Searching for Network for Deep-Dives – Sexing the Interwebs won the
South Asian Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity 2017 in the “Best webseries"/"Special edition” category.

Afrah Shafiq (b. 1989) lives and works in the world of documentary film and visual art sometimes as artist, editor, writer, and designer and at other times as manager, producer and facilitator. She has a special interest in animation,
multimedia, remix, folklore and dreams. When she is not glued to a computer, she makes glass mosaics – some of which can be seen here.

In the past she has worked as the Creative Associate on Paromita Vohra’s web project on sex, love and desire Agents of Ishq; a producer on The Convening, a collateral event of the Kochi Muziris Biennale 2016 by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art
Contemporary, Vienna; and as line-producer and fixer on various international documentary projects set in India by the likes of MTV Finland, Arte France, The BBC, Boiler Room Berlin, Sweden National TV and Arts Council England.

She was selected as one of six fellows for a Film Curation Program conducted by Katha Centre for Film Studies in Mumbai. For over five years she was a curatorial
member of Vikalp, a collective of documentary filmmakers and worked on the programming of monthly documentary film screenings at Alliance Francaise in Mumbai.

In 2012, she worked with video artist Tejal Shah on her multi channel performance video art installation titled Between the Waves that was exhibited at Documenta 13 in Kassel in the capacity of a Post Production Assistant. She has also worked as a research and production assistant with Majlis, a cultural organization in Mumbai as part of the Cinema City Project that was hosted at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bombay, Delhi, Bangalore and Calcutta. Her writing under the section of poetry was selected on the short list at the Toto Funds the Arts Awards in Bangalore 2013.

She handled the production and visual research of a publication titled dates.sites authored by filmmaker, writer and curator Madhusree Dutta, designed by artist Shilpa Gupta and published by Tulika Books in Delhi. In 2012 she worked with
Anupama Rao, Professor, Barnard University, as a Research Associate for a book titled “Postcolonial Urbanism: Studies in the Informalization of Infrastructure and Everyday Life”.

She is currently working as the manager for the 6 th edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival, an electic independent film festival set in the mountain town of Dharamshala.

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