ZA :

Speaking about this idea of iterations and forms, I remember first coming across your work in the exhibition Growing Like a Tree: Sent a Letter (2022-2023) curated by Bunu Dhungana and Sadia Marium Rupa, at Sunaparanta, Goa, (2022). Using solely descriptive words plastered on one of the inaugural walls of the space, the keen observer later realises that it alludes to the names of chapters in your book Cups of Nun Chai (published by Yarbaal books in 2020, and reprinted in 2021) which we visit almost at the end of the show. Using these words as cues, I began building my own visuals before realising that it was a part of a much larger story. What made you display the work in this almost-elusive form?

AH :

That was the first time that Cups of nun chai was showcased in an art gallery in India. And being very text heavy, it is not an easy work to place in a gallery. I also tend to shy away from direct forms of representation. In Sydney, many years earlier I had displayed the work as a large grid of 118 photographs of each person’s hands holding their cup of nun chai. There is a sense of care that those images embody, ruptured by the state violence that underpins their formation. But for me that’s not the most accurate or affective representation of the work. The narrative of Cups of nun chai is built through 60,000 words that took shape via conversations with 118 people over nun chai. Each cup was part of a growing memorial for 118 people killed by the state in the protests that shook the Kashmir valley during the summer of 2010. And in 2016-17 the work—as image and text—was also serialised in 86 editions of the newspaper Kashmir Reader. When I would send the finished texts of each conversation to Kashmir Reader for publishing, the editors of the newspaper would assign each piece a heading. It was these newspaper headings that we later drew from to form the chapter titles in the book. I really treasure reading through those titles, because for me, they embody the true spirit of the work—its content and collaboration. Placing these titles in the main foyer of Sunaparanta became a way to point to the work, to allude to its presence, without stating things too directly. Someday, I’d love to do a full exhibition of the Kashmir Reader newspapers, but Goa in 2022 was not the place to do that.

ZA :

Coming to Paper Txt Msgs from Kashmir (2009-2011), which you describe as a tongue-in-cheek response to the Indian government’s ban on all pre-paid mobile phone services in Kashmir on the basis of ‘security;’ you find alternate sources of communication in a largely technology dependent world. I find it so interesting that these 150 hand written text messages — responses to 1000 notecards that you posted to Kashmir during this phone ban in 2009 — are sources of dissemination and additions to history without being outwardly so. It makes me think of the importance of letters, messages, and video chats as being holders of erased accounts, narrated by the people themselves. I was wondering what your thoughts were on the usage of these conversations in art, and if you think they are historiographies in a way?

AH :

My work emerges out of life, out of events that necessitate a response. And I guess, that pulls the work, and its journey, into an engagement with history; in the sense that the work emerges out of particular events, but it also marks particular events and has the capacity to carry remnants of them through time. Time is very interesting to think about as an unruly collaborator. My work emerges out of particular moments in time, but it also interacts with these moments in ways you cannot plan or foresee. And like the depth of flavour that comes with slow cooking, work can gain its own depth over time too. Paper txt msgs from Kashmir was made in 2009 when communication with a few friends of mine in Kashmir ceased overnight because their pre-paid phones were blocked by the state. It got a bit of renewed life because of the massive communication blackout that happened in Kashmir on August 5th 2019 due to the abrogation of Article 370 which revoked the special status, or autonomy granted under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution to Jammu and Kashmir. It is sad that Paper txt msgs from Kashmir is still relevant, and that communication shutdowns in Kashmir have really only increased. However, I'm also glad the work exists because it points to the fact that the communication blackout that happened in 2019 wasn't something that emerged overnight. It had many years of precedent and practice to it. It is important that this is not overlooked.

ZA :

You are currently working on how the basic need for home is weaponised within the Australian settler-colony through a body of work titled A Deceptively Simple Need. It almost seems like an extension of Surveilling a Crime Scene, especially since the concluding phrase of the film is now the title of the new work. Could you talk about the nature of the project, and this act of hidden continuation within your contemplations?

AH :

All my work feels like a chain of things connected—to me, to life, people, places and central ideas. In 2021 another work of mine called All the Violence Within was reviewed by an Indigenous writer in Australia named Tristen Harwood. He described my photographs “sitting on the edge of the action, as though they are surveilling a crime scene.” That turn of phrase felt so accurate to what I was trying to do, it lingered and came to shape the title of the film that followed. The final line of Surveilling a Crime Scene, states “a deceptively simple need for a home on other people's land. Just add water.” I didn’t plan it, but as new work was seeding and my own housing situation felt quite vulnerable that line kept resonating in my mind. And it became the root for my current body of work which is trying to look at how the simple need for a home in a settler colony like Australia becomes a weapon, that is profited from and then guarded by the irreproachability and apparent innocence of daily life. And so I’m grappling with this in the context of Australia, and in the context of myself; What does the need for home mean, when at its root is the dispossession of someone else from theirs?