RRS: Aqsa Arif – Artist Talk and Film Screening
6 – 8 pm Thursday 18th September
Reid Lecture Theatre
Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite
Join us on Thursday 18th September, from 6pm to 8pm as we welcome interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker Aqsa Arif for our first Race, Rights & Sovereignty event of the new academic year.
Aqsa Arif will talk about her creative practice and recent solo exhibition Raindrops of Rani, followed by a screening of some of her recent film work. The event offers a unique insight into Arif’s multidisciplinary approach, which blends moving image, sculpture, printmaking, and photography to explore themes of identity, belonging, and cultural memory.
Through an intimate sharing of her works, Arif will reflect on how personal and inherited histories shape her cinematic language, drawing on folklore, mythology, and speculative futures. Raindrops of Rani, her most recent body of work, offers a dreamlike meditation on hybridity and diasporic longing, centring the experiences of a mother daughter relationship that exists between worlds, timelines, and cultural legacies.
The event will open up a conversation around the intersections of artist moving image and traditional filmmaking, as well as the collaborative and often nonlinear ways of working as an artist post-art school.
There will be time for Q&A after the talk and screenings.
Aqsa Arif is a Scottish-Pakistani interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Glasgow. Her work explores hybrid identity, displacement, and cultural dissonance through speculative fiction, weaving folklore, mythology, and cinematic language. Drawing from her dual heritage and lived experience, she reclaims and reimagines both pre- and post-colonial worlds.
Arif was nominated for the major national touring exhibition Jerwood Survey III (2023-2024), launching at Southwark Park Galleries in London and touring Cardiff, Sheffield, and Edinburgh. She was awarded the 20/20 residency by UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute, hosted at Kelvingrove, culminating in an exhibition and 20 new permanent acquisitions across UK public art collections.
This event is part of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty programme, supported by the GSA Students Association in partnership with GSA Exhibitions.
