Master of Arts / Multimedia Artist, Filmmaker Amjad Uzair

30000 €

The Terrain Between

Taiteellinen työ / siihen pohjautuva työ | Yksivuotinen

I am applying for a grant to develop and present my project, The Terrain Between, in February 2024 at MAA-Tila Project Space in Helsinki. The project includes a series of paintings, an experimental film, and story-sharing walks. The work examines the ideas and effects of history, inheritance, and migration on the evolution of identity across different generations of a family. It centers on stories from three migrations: my grandmother from India to Pakistan, my mother from Pakistan to the United States, and my move from Pakistan to Finland. What forms of knowledge do these stories generate? How do they influence individual and collective memories? Are these stories capable of bringing geographically separated generations closer to distant places, distant times, and ultimately one another? The project inserts stories from the family between the gaps in the imperial narrative of global migration to expose new histories and explore alternative social orders. The project accumulates micro-histories from the family through private archives such as film footage and orally transmitted stories, songs, and poems. Through a discursive approach, the project analyzes these personal traces of history against suspect neocolonial narratives of socio-economic progress, cultural negotiation, and assimilation. The project navigates private and public archives in a non-sequential manner. It employs multidisciplinary artistic modes to move back and forth between memory and text, time and place. The work allows gaps in one archive to be informed by that of the other, questioning the legitimacy of the archives in the process. The work investigates how history and heritage impact our changing sense of self and relationship to our roots and routes. It embraces, alters, and intervenes with history, intending to discover new regimes of migration, new constructions of imagined communities, and new concepts of citizenship.