Conversation with Arshia Fatima Haq of Discostan, Lucas Odahara and The Many Headed Hydra, moderated by Aziz Sohail

5 August, 7 pm

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Collective making is one of the central impulses of Kal. In a patriarchal and capitalist world that values individual practice, we believe in fostering community building and working across and with relationships formed slowly and overtime. This conversation brings together the practices of Arshia Fatima Haq, Lucas Odahara and The Many Headed Hydra, who each utilise building infrastructures for coming together within and as an inherent part of their practice.

Arshia Fatima Haq (born in Hyderabad, India) works through film, visual art, performance, and sound, in feminist modes outside of the Western model. She is interested in counterachives and speculative narratives, and is currently exploring themes of embodiment, mysticism, indigenous and localized knowledge within the context of Sufism. She is the founder of Discostan, a collaborative decolonial project and record label working with cultural production from South and West Asia and North Africa. She hosts and produces monthly radio shows on Dublab and NTS. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally at museums, galleries, nightclubs, and in the streets, and has been featured at Hammer Museum,  Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Broad Museum, LACE, Toronto International Film Festival, MOMA New York, Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Pacific Film Archive amongst others. She received her MFA in Film and Video from California Institute of the Arts in 2005 and is currently based in Los Angeles.

Lucas Odahara, born in São Paulo, lives and works in Berlin. He holds a bachelor’s in product design from the São Paulo State University and a masters in fine arts from the University of the Arts of Bremen. He is currently a recipient of the Kunstfonds Bonn Arbeitsstipendium and a guest lecturer at the University of the Arts of Bremen. Probing the complex relationships between body, space and memory, Lucas works in diverse media to create installations in which personal and external visual and textual materials are invoked to recompose diverse scenes. Centering histories that are rooted outside of Western spaces, Lucas reimagines the materials he encounters as open negotiations in a present that is never complete.

The Many Headed Hydra collective is dedicated to queer ecologies, myth making and situated practices that emerge from bodies of water. TMHH collaborates with inhabitants of different lands and seas to cross-connect feminist and decolonial research, art making, and publishing. TMHH uses ritual and fiction, shape-shifting collectivities and storytelling to set resistant knowledges into motion. TMHH’s magazines are a performative device – they circulate as rumours, gatherings, printed matter, performances, exhibitions, radio broadcasts, evocations . . .

This conversation is part of the House of Kal Berlin, which unfolds in trans*oceanic correspondences and collaboration with the Houses of Kal Karachi and Colombo.