New photography exhibition in Bradford charts a mother and daughter's journey to Lahore
Zaibunnisa is an Urdu word which means ‘the beauty of woman’ and it refers to Wahid’s mother’s birth name before she emigrated from Pakistan to the UK in 1982 for an arranged marriage. The show features 76 photographs and addresses the themes of loss, memory, displacement, identity and migration while also incorporating a celebration of the promise of the future and the happy married life that Wahid’s parents made for themselves in Birmingham. There are also archive photographs of Zaibunnisa when she was a young woman and family snapshots as well as diary extracts from the journal Wahid kept of her journey with her mother.
“Wahid is an artist who uses photography to convey her identity as a British Pakistani Muslim through her deeply rooted family history and the integration of South Asian migrants with the UK,” says Impressions Gallery curator Raquel Villar-Pérez. “Her photographs explore womanhood, memory, migration and the notion of home and belonging. The exhibition in some ways reflects the story of many of the women who migrated to Bradford in the 1970s and 80s. We hope it will resonate with them and their families.”
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Hide AdThe images are very evocative and quite moving, particularly those showing Wahid’s mother exploring her former family home. Being in that space affected both mother and daughter profoundly – for Wahid there was a connection to the building and her maternal family whom she had never met, while for her mother it held memories of a different time and an alternative sense of herself. Villar-Pérez says that Wahid had devised the project with four ‘chapters’ in mind – the family album, the Partition of India, loss and identity.
“When I started thinking about how best to present those strands on the gallery walls, I noticed that there were many other sublayers within them,” says Villar-Pérez. “The idea of home stood out for me, conceptually and visually. Maryam dedicated a great deal of time documenting the place that once was home to Zaibunnisa in Lahore, so I thought it was important to foreground this as a symbol of a caring home that guarded who Zaibunnisa was. When she left for the UK, it all changed. What once was home is not home anymore, as it belongs to other people, extended family members, and you can feel that sense of ‘unbelongingess’ in the photographs that Maryam took of her mum in the house.”
Those images are very poignant; others are joyful and celebratory – there is a feeling of reconnection that comes through in the photographs and perhaps a laying to rest of something. “The past is what ignited this project – the will to know who Zaibunnisa was and all that surrounded her in Pakistan including that abstract notion of home,” says Villar-Pérez. “It led to an unexpected yet enlightening outcome, and that is that home is in the present, but they needed to visit Zaibunnisa’s past to realise and make peace with it, while Maryam needed to visit Pakistan to connect to her maternal family’s past and feel complete with her own identity.”
These are very powerful, complicated emotions at play and accordingly there is a thoughtful, reflective quality to all the photographs through which Wahid delicately intertwines her mother’s story with her own. “From Zaibunnisa’s perspective, memory, loss, displacement, identity and migration come about because of her relocation to the UK,” says Villar-Pérez. “In a way, all these emotional states are the consequence of leaving her family behind. In Maryam’s case, all of them depart from a sense of longing; longing for the family she never met, the lifestyle she never had, and that stems from the memories passed down to her through the generations.”
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Hide AdAs with all good art, the intensely specific and personal has the capacity to become universal and Villar-Pérez hopes that the exhibition will speak to audiences in many different ways and on several levels. “Maryam’s photographs are extremely poetic and contain many nuanced elements that allow for further interpretations and layers of understanding,” she says. “We hope that visitors to the exhibition will find something within it that moves them and that they can relate to.”
The exhibition runs until July 1.