Since visiting Guyana in 2017, my practice has aimed to create portals to home through researching narratives of collective resistance, building post-colonial archives, and thinking about the role of the matriarch in relation to identity formation and belonging. As a member of the Guyanese diaspora living in Canada, I hold a collection of stories from many storytellers in a web of communities that, though geographically separated, are bound together by acts of resistance as we define our own methods of documentation and preservation. The following project brings together images from four series shaped by this exploration.
My first response resulted in Along the Demerara, 2017 – Present, an ongoing photographic series of twenty images that documents my relationship with Guyana and highlights the historic significance of Victoria Village, where both of my parents are from. In November 1839, ex-slaves pooled their resources to purchase the village in an act of collective resistance against British colonial rule. Despite this unique legacy, I rarely come across anyone familiar with the village’s existence. Colonial archives of Guyana often depict people as labourers in the extraction of resources for capitalist gain, while this series aims to document life, encompassing grief, joy, and holistic existence.
I found similar levels of erasure on a more personal level while seeking more information about my maternal grandmother, who passed away a year before I was born. Looking for Lucille, 2019 – Present is a series of photographs, family archives, embroidery, and sound that recreates and represents her legacy through oral history juxtaposed with her passport, an official government document riddled with errors, including her legal name, which was recorded as “Darky.” In this portrait, I forge a counter-archive created by the community that knew her best.
In 2023, as part of a partnership between the Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI) and the Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) Fellowship in Miami, I continued researching themes related to Guyana and connecting them to broader Caribbean and global contexts, with a focus on colonial erasure and post-colonial archives. This culminated in the creation of a single-channel video, Always About Land, partly inspired by Wanda Nanibush’s 2016 article in Canadian Art titled “About Land.” The video reflects on the parallels between Victoria Village and Miami—connected culturally, historically, and physically by the North Atlantic. In the accompanying narration, my father speaks about his experiences near the Demerara River and the colonists’ interests in controlling both the waterways and the land.
I haven’t had the opportunity to return to Guyana since my initial visit, and these new feelings of longing resulted in Papaya Dreams, 2024; one part is rooted in my experiences, while the other is derived from inherited stories. The central image is a papaya shifting across geographical plains—from my grandmother’s kitchen in Victoria Village to my backyard in a suburb of Bradford, Ontario. The fruit acts as a portal to “home,” floating downstream on the Demerara.
Above: Farihah Aliyah Shah, Looking for Lucille (documentation), 2019. Photo by Marco Pavan. Image courtesy of the artist.
Farihah Aliyah Shah (b. 1989) is a Canadian lens-based artist and educator based in Bradford, ON (Treaty 18) who explores identity formation through the colonial gaze, forced migration in relation to labour of goods and services, race, connectivity to land, and collective memory. She analyzes and critiques the photographic canon while building new narratives and archives that narrow gaps within her personal history addressing intersectionalities of her identity: multi-diasporic, female-identified, Black, Caribbean, etc. Shah was the 2019 recipient of the John Hartman Award, long-listed in 2022 for the New Generation Photography Award, and the 2023 recipient of the CCI x WOPA Fellowship at the Perez Art Museum of Miami (PAMM). Shah is also the co-founding member of Mast Year Collective; an artist duo exploring kinship through collective practice. She has exhibited internationally in Asia, Europe, and North America.
This article is published in issue 42.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue
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