we're the ones we’ve been looking for
2023
Photographic collage, zine
‘we’re the ones we’ve been looking for’ is a response to the canon of Western liberal feminist discourse on South Asian bodies. Who gets to tell us what freedom looks like for us, but us? Removing the role of the artist as the sole creator of an image and a message, I invited photographers of South Asian origin, in relation to femininity, to respond to the prompt through an open call: Imagine who you might be if you give yourself the permission.
Moving away from the existing visual cultures of freedom, we turned to memory for answers, and crafted a message of bodily autonomy where we reframe the body as the locus of freedom, and permission as a freedom practice. A diverse array of photographs was transmuted into a photographic collage as a result, wheat-pasted in Karachi in December 2023.
Review
“Ali’s works transcend stereotypical representations of the body, by innovatively fusing together multiple images to create freeform bodies.”
-- Caroline Molloy on Photomonitor
Acknowledgments
The title of this work is borrowed from June Jordan’s 1980 poem Passion, published in Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). This work was conceived for New Narratives in Photography, a collaborative residency project between GRAIN Projects and Tasweerghar, supported by the British Council, 2023-24.
Contributors: Alishah Iqbal, Falaks Vasa, Ifra Khaliq, Najam ul Hassan, Nikhil Dharmaraj, Omair Danish, Oraway Majaan, Ray Syed, Shivangi Jain, Siddhant Talwar, Simrah Farrukh, Zaira Hussain