Perhaps one of the greatest threats to interpretation is the notion of linear singularity: one right way to see or do things, one story that unfolds evenly with a tidy beginning, middle, and ending. To disrupt the notion of linear singularity is to challenge the very nationalist ideologies that work to oppress honest voices and have long silenced stories with deeper, harder-to-look-at truths. Like many great postcolonial artists of her time, Victoria-based Muslim artist Farheen Haq (she/they) complicates settler-colonialist linearities through multidisciplinary works that invite deeply personal reflection and poetic self-inquiry. “I am my mother’s daughter,” Haq’s current exhibition, can be seen through August until September 26th at Grenfell Art Gallery in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. 

On the gallery walls, painted a rich and lush shade of plum, you can find a white didactic that starts with a question: “Whose voice do you hear in the exhibition?” As introduction, Jenelle M. Pasiechnik describes Haq’s practice as “intensely personal,” and invites the viewer in as witness to her role as daughter and mother, and as storyteller of her family’s history, one that brought them to Canada from Pakistan and India. The story Haq tells is both literally and figuratively one of deconstruction, a story that asks more questions than it offers answers. On the floor below the didactic, there is a series of loose and half-piled bricks built and falling around a flat, pond-like video that oscillates between concealment and revelation of the Arabic word Iqra. “Revelation” (Digital video loop, bricks) imbues the oft “calcified into rigid structures” nature of its titular concept and makes it warble between crumbling brick residue, bringing forth questions of national identity and echoing destruction of ancient holy sites. Above this multidisciplinary work is a series of billboard-style images entitled “Body of Questions” (digital prints on aluminum) that run along different walls of the gallery and present a series of questions asked of the artist in the Islamophobic post-9/11 era as a Muslim woman in Canada. These questions of identity include “What is your mother tongue?”, “Place of birth:” and “What is your mother’s maiden name.” They are paired with intimate raw images of body parts: an ear, a close-up of a soft belly, the fingers of two hands linked in vulnerable tension. Moving through the exhibition, I felt like I was reading the kind of story that leads its reader to water without telling them how to feel. These stories, I believe, are ultimately more persuasive, and they risk more, too. 

Farheen Haq, Body of Questions, courtesy of Grenfell Art Gallery

Of the many powerful video works in the installation, “Ankhein Band Ke Dekho (Close your eyes and see; 2022)” really stuck out to me as a moving and consolidating work that merged themes of immigration, mother-daughter relationship, and feminist praxis. Here, Haq takes inspiration from her mother’s wedding day, in which her mother had her eyes closed for the duration of the ceremony. In this colourful and billowing video that follows closeups of embroidered sheer fabrics and watery backdrops among other evocative and dreamy visuals, Haq reimagines her mother not as helpless victim but as a powerful woman with “inner resourcing and strength,” as curator Haema Sivanesan writes in the show’s exhibition catalogue. Haq’s brave and unflinching pursuit to spool and unspool the narratives of her family identity and history are at once inspiring, jarring, and restorative.

Aley Waterman is a writer of fiction, poetry, and music from and living in Newfoundland. Her first novel Mudflowers was published by Dundurn in fall of 2023. She has had work appear in Border Crossings, Brooklyn Review, Bad Nudes Magazine, the Trampoline Hall Podcast, Riddle Fence, and elsewhere.