Aisha Asghar

My practice centres around the complexities of identity and how these can be found and pieced together from our experiences, memories, and relationships. I am interested in how identities can be curated through the associations and narratives tied to objects and how objects have been used historically as physical evidence of the materiality of human life. My research considers museum and archives as memory institutions and containers for history and investigates how this can be applied to domestic and sacred spaces. Working from family photo albums, childhood memories, and past and present perspectives, I use processes of distortion, dissection, deletion, retrieval, and supplementation, to investigate the relationship between collective memory, fabricated memory, and reality. My work challenges societal ideas of value and investigates the preservation of histories, memories, narratives, and identities, through using spaces, objects, and people as sacred ‘holding places’. This has translated into my current practice through the recreation of a domestic and spiritual space to act as safe holding places for personal, familial, and generational materialities and narratives. The act of making my work is a cathartic process. One that reveals and embraces identity as an ever-evolving concept, finding comfort in the familiarity of nostalgia in a time of change and uncertainty.