Nosheen Khwaja
Nosheen is an artist, designer, tech and filmmaker given enough time. She’s worked in many disciplines over the years but gravitates towards installations, large textile sculptures, film and sound.
The themes that run throughout her work are of the connections between power, control, seduction and the body. The brown female body within the cultural and physical landscape, of disruption and creating alternate lives that are connected and sensuous.
Nosheen is passionate about art and knowledge being available to all, and for it be accessible and interactive. She wants the divide between ‘art’ and viewer to dissolve and for the experience to be direct and tactile, fully involving the senses.
She co-founded the film training course Digital Desperados, is artistic director of GLITCH Film Festival and a member of POC2 – the programmers of colour collective. Over the last 20 years Nosheen has curated screenings, shown artwork and performed in Copenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin, Amsterdam, Montreal, New York and the UK.
She is currently also working on an experimental short on desire and the hidden places in the body.
BROWN NOISE/WHITE NOISE
I’ve worked in many mediums throughout my life and the thread running through them has focused on disruption, the landscape, control, flow, power and desire.
It’s always been my aim to create art which would physically affect the viewer.
I intend to make a short experimental film which will be projected in an echoic chamber, that I will construct. The inner walls will be made from raw sheep wool from the Highlands – a valuable natural resource that is often burned with petrol as it wouldn’t fetch enough money at market. I will also create a soundscape, including natural phenomena such as singing icebergs/ whistling winds & storms/ water/migrating birds/and the bodies’ own beats which the viewer will be able to hear in the chamber at quiet interludes.
I want people to interact fully with this piece. To touch it, smell it, have their perception altered by it.
This soundscape will alternate with periods of profound silence generated within an echoic chamber.
If someone stays long enough in these soundless spaces, then they can start to hallucinate.
Perhaps they will create their own internal film from everything their senses will absorb.
The key thing that I wish to communicate with this piece is that everything is connected; what is within and without….the state of inhabiting and loss. My observation is that sometimes people forget that the world we live in, the landscape, our bodies and our senses are all connected.
Our actions affect our environment and vice versa. It can be easy for people in relatively privileged positions to feel they aren’t affected by something that happens hundreds of miles away, or that they will be safe. That all they have to complain about is hot summers, wetter colder winters and the rising cost of imported food.
There will be abstract qualities to this piece, although the film installation will allow for more specificity.
I have two frustrations with dialogues around climate change that I wish to explore:
*the centralisation of white voices and concern for the wellbeing of western nation states
*that the blame is pinned on the consumer and not on capitalism.
Deconstruction, re-connection and communication are key to change.
