Hello and welcome to Bee-sides, the podcast series from Crossmopollinate. I’m Inah, and this episode was a conversation recorded a while back around June 2024. The release was quite overdue. A lot of things have happened since then, but we had asked Ahsan to share some of his artworks for the upcoming Interval issue “Longing and Belonging. Ambivalence in International Studenthood.” Ahsan’s work, from the series “Land of Pure” from 2018, can be found on his website. For our issue, he has shared three images you can find on our Interval Vortex page, where we showcase selected artworks from contemporary art practitioners. The conversation starts and ends a bit abruptly, but I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did hearing about his work.
So to start off, I’m going to read the introduction that Ahsan has shared with me.
Ahsan Masood is a queer Pakistani artist, currently located in Heidelberg, Germany. The artist completed his MFA from Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Finland, in 2014, and his BFA from the National College of Arts in Pakistan. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, and has also been the recipient of the International Artists Residency program by Greatmore Studios in Cape Town, 2011, the International Artists Residency program by NoArte: Wall of Europe, in Sardinia, 2013, and the “Taking Time” Artists Workshop, Helsinki, 2013. Currently, Ahsan is pursuing his second master’s in Germany, in South Asian Studies. Additionally, his practice aims to articulate the notions of safety within physical and intellectual spaces of representation: the safety of being visible for having non-conforming ideas within a militant state and of being proclaimed the Other by the spectator’s eye.
Such a view, Ahsan claims, is the moment of un-safety of being seen through the lens of sexual taboos, gender binaries, ethnic hierarchies, religious freedoms, and the public availability of that information. Ahsan says that these are the struggles of being looked at and judged, of being reduced to a cliché or a racial slur.
Furthermore, Ahsan attempts to declare the queer brown body as a contact zone and proclaim its struggle as sacred, understanding the queer brown bodies as spaces which allow the dangerous coming together of orthodox religion, state-sanctioned oppression, colonial laws which criminalize their conduct, and queer sexuality.
In the following conversation, we looked at the poster-like pieces from Land of Pure that deal with notions of extremism, racism, queerness, and the right to protest within the premises of the state — that the artist has experienced while inhabiting diverse locations such as Finland, Germany, and Pakistan. Before listening, I recommend you take a glance at the images shared under Ahsan’s profile in Vortex!
…
For the entire transcript, contact us under transculturalhd@gmail.com
