Date with The Archive | The Shape Shifting Archive | A Conversation with Afrah Shafiq | March 26, 2025

Join us for a Date with the Archive with multi/new media artist Afrah Shafiq! Afrah will be sharing with us her experiments with making hybrid forms—websites, video games, sculptures and more—that allow for different ways in which archives can be sites of contemplation, navigation, interaction and play. In other words, allow the archives to shape-shift.

Using the process of research as an artistic playground, Afrah’s work emerges from long-term engagements with archives—both institutional and informal—stories, and other fugitive material across the internet. Her work intertwines history, memory, folklore and fantasy to create a speculative world born of remix culture. Through a diversity of research modes and devices, her work is informed by practices of reading, organising, plotting, and classifying.

Afrah is interested in the rupturing of existing narratives, ‘searching’ for the invisible, and creating subversive, speculative new ways of looking at the familiar. Her work takes hybrid forms that bring together text, sound, animation, video games, and sculpture to create interactive, sometimes simulated atmospheres to experience and unlearn. She seeks ways to retain the tactile within the digital and poetry within technology. 

Afrah also received a fellowship from IFA to work with the CSSSC archives in 2014-15, where she created hybrid videos that portray stories of resistance of women in the 19th century, with a website called Sultana's Reality. 

The Shape Shifting Archive with Afrah Shafiq
March 26, 2025 | 06:30 PM IST

Register on Zoom.
Or join us live on our Facebook page.

Launched in 2018, The IFA Archive is a space that holds the diverse materials of the projects supported and implemented by IFA over the years, currently featuring materials from over 624 projects at theifaarchive.org/ and more in the physical space.

Date with The Archive is a series of talks by artists and researchers across different practices who have used archives extensively for their creative work, to bring to focus the potential of the archive as a significant resource for artistic and scholarly explorations. 

The IFA Archive is built with support from Indorama Charitable Trust.