Sabahat Ali Wani is a writer, researcher, and artist from Kashmir. She is the recipient of the Project We Be Imaging grant from the American Assembly, Columbia University. She is a mixed media storytelling artist who, through her art experiments, aims to create a space for bold and critical statements. Her artwork has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Club Plum Literary Journal, About Place Journal (Black Earth Institute), and Blue Marble Review. Her work not only attempts to appreciate her community’s culture but also refuses to shy away from criticizing the same.
“In addition to borrowing from Hendrick Goltzius’s Phaeton (1588), Fall of a Shah was created in appreciation of Kashmiri women’s wardrobes.
“Fall of a Shah is part of a larger mixed media project, Revisit, that experiments with visual storytelling by intersecting photography and other media. Just like the name suggests, this larger project revisits the scarves that are commonly worn but under-celebrated in Kashmiri culture and places them at the centre of storytelling. As a Kashmiri woman myself, I have used the scarves as inspiration and as a site of experimentation. Additional creative, imaginative, mythical, and fictive elements are used to open space for satire, criticism, and criticality.
“Through Fall of a Shah and other works from Revisit, I aim to show that women are the active participants of the anti-state struggle in Kashmir, where resistance can be located in the threads of our torn clothes, the buttons of our old shirts, the neckline of our pherans, and the sleeves that cover our arms as they rise against the oppression. As an artist of conflict and resistance, through this series, I hope to unravel presence—the presence of resistance, resilience, and feminist rage in our everyday life as Kashmiri women—through visuals based on our clothes, which transcend the boundaries of conventionality and bring in the element of otherwise.”
