Mara Ahmed

Mara Ahmed
Long Island, New York, USA

STATEMENT

My art practice is invested in trespassing borders and, as Gloria Anzaldua has said, in reconceptualizing differences by disrupting racial, political, and cultural demarcations. The endeavor to decolonize knowledge, lift the voices of the oppressed, and build community shapes my work across multiple disciplines and narrative formats. 

The personal is rigorously political in my practice. For example, the experimental short film, Le Mot Juste (2021), which was selected for a juried exhibition by Chicago’s South Asia Institute, is a fusion of autobiography, film, and dance. It attempts to chart my diasporic journey across continents by homing in on three languages: Urdu, French, and English. In the analog and digital collage series, This Heirloom (2012-2014) which has been widely exhibited in New York and California, I recreated my own history by using old black and white photographs sourced from my family archive. I juxtaposed my ancestors against South Asian architectural details but on the wrong side of the Pakistan-India border. We moved to Long Island in 2020, at the peak of the pandemic. I struggled with isolation within isolation and disruption within a larger context of displacement. I decided to weave this experience into broader threads, connect with a wide range of people, and explore our thoughts and emotions together. This is how I created The Warp & Weft, a multilingual, global archive of stories that aimed to capture the zeitgeist of that year. It opened in 2022 as a multimedia installation at Rochester Contemporary Art Center.

To a large extent, we are where we come from. Our provenance shapes our DNA. I come from parents divided by language, tradition, and religious denomination, their lives upended by personal loss and a world coming to grips with colonial partitions and the mutilation of indigenous land. Hence, I try to straddle differences and make sense of what is jarring and at odds. I am interested in patterns and mathematical balance, in the shifting sense of space created by tessellation in Islamic art, and the Afrofuturist idea of hacking linearity to lay claim to a more equitable future. These are some of the ideas that animate my work.

BIO

Best known for her non-linear interdisciplinary work, Mara Ahmed produces documentaries, soundscapes, and artwork that challenge political borders and colonial logic. Mara was born in Lahore and educated in Belgium, Pakistan, and the US. Her art practice reflects these displacements and multiplicities. She has directed and produced three films, including The Muslims I Know (2008), Pakistan One on One (2011), and A Thin Wall (2015). Her films have been broadcast on PBS and screened at international film festivals. She is currently working on The Injured Body, a documentary about racism in America that focuses on the voices of women of color. Mara’s collage work has been exhibited coast-to-coast in the United States. She was awarded an NYSCA grant in 2023 for her multimedia project, Return to Sender: Women of Color in Colonial Postcards & the Politics of Representation.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
www.maraahmedstudio.com

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