A response to BlackFlash’s Fall/Winter issue “Infinities.”
Moska Rokay
Moska Rokay is the Archivist at the Institute of Islamic Studies (UofT) tasked with coordinating the Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA). As a refugee and settler on Turtle Island, she is actively involved in the Afghan-Canadian diaspora community and is a co-founder of a Canadian nonprofit organization called ARCH (Afghans Reviving Culture and Heritage). In 2020, she was the recipient of the ACA New Professional Award as well as the Archivaria Gordon Dodds Student Paper Prize. She completed her Master of Information at the University of Toronto and defended her MI thesis in Toronto in 2019.
The Muslims in Canada Archives’ lead archivist, Moska Rokay, works to reclaim narratives in the current Canadian archival landscape — offering a proactive, generative response to an often defensive posture in academia and policy sectors.
‘Infinities’ brings together a range of Canadian artists and writers to examine the influence of the traditions and conventions of Islamic visual cultures on contemporary art. From techniques and symbols to concepts and designs, artists such as Tazeen Qayyum, Abdi Osman, Shaheer Zazai, Azadeh Elmizadeh, and Jamelie Hassan have employed various methods and materials to not only show the ways in which Islamic visual cultures continues to inform their work, but also the challenges, possibilities and implications in doing so.