Photographer and filmmaker Farihah Shah draws on family histories to create visual “portals” between Guyana and Canada. Her artistic project, “Always About Land,” evokes a diasporic language that collapses time and space, illuminating how the enduring legacies of colonialism and resource extraction have shaped both locations.
Farihah Aliyah Shah
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.
Several of the works in this issue consider how the domestic is shaped not only by private life but also by global currents, family histories, and consumer goods, nudging at the conditions that shape how we live, where we live, and with whom we choose to share our lives.