Performing desires through mimesis & letters of love: Conjuring sufis, staging tawa'if-courtesans, and querying Qasim

Shaheen, Qasim Riza (2022) Performing desires through mimesis & letters of love: Conjuring sufis, staging tawa'if-courtesans, and querying Qasim. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This PhD route through Professional Practice is a three-fold project. Firstly, it reflects on and discusses two decades of my past works in relation to art practices of similar thematic or aesthetic concerns, primarily through autoethnography and self-reflexivity within an art museum and gallery context. Secondly, it explores the process of having made new work through imaginary epistolary and performance notes. Thirdly, it presents a film document of the live events along with rehearsal footage and interviews with participants and performers. My original contribution to knowledge is the identification of the ways in which the exploration of desire through self-reflexivity, performance, mimesis and letters of love can be articulated through the mediation and staging of the artist-djinn in a selection of artist-initiated projects. Imaginary time-travel through shape-shifting creates new approaches in dialoguing with source communities and audiences in art museums and galleries. My contribution to knowledge is also in the exploration of queer Muslim identity through autoethnographic, creative and pedagogic methods that encourage an expanded field of self-knowledge and self-reflexivity. The impetus of the artwork discussed and produced during this PhD is primarily led by the imaginaries of seventeenth century Punjabi Sufi mystic, Bulleh Shah, Tawa’if-courtesans and Khwajaseras. Furthermore, the live work produced for this research extends the cinematic frame of Kamal Amrohi’s 1972 film Pakeezah into a live performance- interpretation. This commentary also interrogates the rhetoric around the term queer. Having loitered around the periphery of a Euro-American frame of reference, analysis and discussion of my art practice begins to radically revision this. I present queer notions and gender atypicality from alternative cultural perspectives centred outside of, or alongside western critical thought and academic discourse in identity politics, and through more personal, nuanced, familial and cultural codes of a diasporic Muslim South Asian heritage.