Story time

Last week we (Shamshad Khan, Habiba Shenza Rahman, and I) started the second phase of Different Moons when we drove to Accrington and interviewed Mr Muzhar Hussain; an interview that I recorded for later use in our project.

Mr Hussain (above right, with his daughter-in-law, Hafiza) entertained us with several hours of his memories, thoughts and reflections on his life - starting with his family and childhood in Lahore, then partition, his early education, his travels as a student to Lancashire, and finally his subsequent involvement with the community in Haslingden. Mr Hussain was one of the very earliest south Asian visitors who settled in Rossendale, and he took a very active part in local community politics, even standing at one time for the council elections. He was an instrumental figure is establishing the first mosque and islamic centre, the community council, and a wide range of other initiatives. 

Mr Hussain is an impressive man, with a lively mind and a wealth of stories on many, many subjects. His memories will form a valuable part of the archive we hope to build as part of the Different Moons project. They will also form part of a dialogue we're holding with young people with a background in the south Asian community. Shamshad and Habiba will be taking a selection of these stories to the young people at the Islamic Supplementary School to help start a dialogue about their community and its culture. At the same time I'm taking one particular story told by Mazhar Hussain about his grand-father, a story about a djinn (a supernatural being often known as a genie) and I'll use it to make a short animated film to be shown to teenagers at the local Youth Club held at Haslingden Library. 

Intersections

We are hoping to organise a Different Moons exhibition in November 2014 at the Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery in Rawtenstall - a celebration of the local South Asian heritage community. Our friends at the Whitaker are enthusiastic about the idea, and we now need to raise the funding for the exhibition itself, as well as the events that will lead up to and accompany  it.

I've been looking at ways of creating an inspirational space within the Whitaker's galleries and came to the decision to develop some of the shadow-puppet work we undertake at Horse + Bamboo. The idea is to create lanterns that use islamic pattern forms and project them on the gallery walls, combined with poetry and other writings. 

Then today I came across these photographs of an installation by the US based Pakistan-born artist Anila Quayyum Agha. Called 'Intersections' the cube is two metres square, so it's much larger than anything I had planned, but the effect is so exactly how I imagined the lantern idea. 

Nothing is new under the sun but inspiration is, well, inspiring wherever and whenever you find it.