Ace, you’ve been described as a “multi-hyphenate”, working with everyone from the British Fashion Council to Vogue Singapore. How would you describe your practice in a single word or sentence?

A: I think chaotic, to be honest!  My energies are in lots of different places and industries, and I think that’s my strong suit for my practice. My aesthetics are well-informed from various sides of the creative industry – fashion, arts, graphic design, which is what I study. And I think I bring all those different aspects in my practice as an artist specifically.

Mohammed, I’ll move to you – as well as a rich and varied visual output, you also have a literary aspect to your work. Did one practice come first, or have you always worked across different mediums?

M: I started making zines, so I was actually doing both, writing them and illustrating them. At the moment, it’s very visual and quite sculptural, I’ve been dabbling in some woodwork and installation. But I did an anthropology degree, so coming out of that heavily academic background, I realised how inaccessible it was, and I feel like the visual is a great way to cut through that and communicate stories and ideas in a way that is immediately impactful and emotive.

Puer, your work spans everything from costume and set design to mixed media works and performance. Do you feel more aligned with one practice than the others?

P: I think when I started BRIT school, I was very traditional through painting, but it was very prescribed, like just copying techniques from artists – I didn’t really know what conceptual art was. When my friends mentioned Marina Abramović I was like, oh my god, you can be an artist through performance?! I think I was drawn to performance art because it’s a way of conveying emotion through the body without having to visually or verbally explain things. I think it’s the embodied practice that resonates with me the most.

Ace, I’d also love to hear more about your project “Threads” with the British Fashion Council and London Fashion Week exploring the impact and influence that South Asia has had on the fashion industry. Could you tell me a bit more about what brought you to this project?

A: For that project, I was brought on to model for it. A lot of the textiles were curated from traditional works and fabric found all around different parts of South Asia which were incorporated into the shoot. It was really impactful because it gave credit where credit’s due to the South Asian fashion industry – a lot of the West’s factories, production, and even skill set has roots in South Asia and the Black and Brown world, really the whole of the Global South.

I tapped into a pre-colonial energy in my expression of gender in that project, because I don’t really associate myself with anything, but I find it odd sometimes because the way that I present myself is actually more masculine in a traditional South Asian pre-colonial sense. A lot of men often had long hair, wore lots of jewellery and glamorous outfits with lots of colour. It felt good to be in that project, and sick to see it in the ICA. I’d never stepped foot into that institution, and the first time I ever went to it, I was everywhere on the walls. It was really special.

Mohammed, I would be interested to hear more about your work “Awake”, described as an eco-sentimental, anti-colonial exploration of nature, and interspecies kinship. Could you first describe the work for readers and explain the inspiration behind the project?

M: For the paintings on the walls, I made these kinds of rooms from flora and fauna, but also with this kind of fantastical set design imagery, with these big green flowing curtains behind racialised figures in pyjamas, who are depicting my friends. I’m pushing back against this kind of Orientalist tradition of depicting racialised bodies in tropical flora and fauna – I wanted to ground them in a UK context, because that’s where they are, and they have a relationship with the land there. Then there are smaller paintings which are called Nocturnal Omissions, speaking to the violence that migrant and racialised bodies face historically across waterways. They’re these nightmare scenes, and self-portraits – I wanted agency of my own image to represent this kind of violence.

I don’t want to present a straightforwardly celebratory image, or one that dwells just on the trauma. I think these two things happen together and in conversation, so it was important for me to have that kind of nuanced presentation. In the middle is the eponymous sculpture called “Awake”. It’s this kind of trapezoid bed structure that mimics the wonky one-point perspective I use in my paintings. It had striped bedding to mirror the people in the pyjamas, and this very carceral, but also very sleepy, “honk shoo, honk shoo” look. There are these matchbox paintings of people asleep embedded into the pillows, and there’s a cavity in the middle, filled with soil with sprouts growing out of it. It’s kind of spiky, and a bit uninviting, but it’s also a bed, and lots of people tried to sleep on it. (Laughs)

Puer, I’m really drawn to your costume design for “The Silver Maiden” for Michelle Williams Gamaker’s “Thieves”. Could you tell me more about the process of creating the costume and how the partnership began?

P: Michelle was my tutor at Goldsmiths, she actually interviewed me before I got in. She was one of the only people of colour at Goldsmiths, and she’s also South Asian, so we had a connection from the beginning. There were parallels between what we were looking at, like decolonising existing narratives, with hers more focused on Hollywood and how a lot of films were casted, where instead of having an Asian actor, they would cast a white person to do yellow face or brown face. I worked with Michelle on one film, and then after that, Michelle was working on “Thieves”, which was partly commissioned by the South London Gallery, and she wanted me to make this costume for the silver maiden.

This film was based off of the “Thief of Baghdad” – there was this silver maiden character, a kind of Oriental robot that didn’t really have a life. In the same way as before, a white woman was cast in the original film to wear this really decadent Eastern outfit – you can’t really tell where it’s from, but it has a kind of South Asian and Central Asian vibe. Michelle sent me a 30 second reference and I reinterpreted it in my own style. The whole thing was made from scratch with lots of embroidered parts to it. Michelle is an ongoing collaborator of mine, which is really nice to continue after being at university. The dynamic has changed – we’re working alongside each other rather than her being my teacher still, which I really enjoy.

It feels like identity and heritage are important and common themes running through each of your practices. Would you be able to share a little about your connection to your ancestry and one way it presents itself in your work?

P: I’m interested in exploring religion in my practice. I try to think of it a bit more intuitively and see what I connect to, because I’m very spiritual and interested in what would have happened if Bangladesh or South Asia wasn’t colonised by Persia where they brought Islam in. What would our practices have been otherwise? I feel like Islam would have made its way in in some way, but if things were less enforced on us, what would we be drawn to?

A: I really resonate with that. I feel like one thing I’ve said a lot when I’m describing my work is that it’s about connections between people, places, and history – different ideas. And I think that’s because I’m Bengali slash Bangladeshi, there’s a massive meeting between Indo-Islamic worlds within that region and a connection in the symbolism we use to depict divinity. It has different outputs, but it comes from the same root.

M: I resonate with what both of you have said about drawing on spirituality and cultural forms from the region. For me, through my practice and how it connects to heritage, I try to tie in wider kind of socio-historical happenings and events with more granular, personal histories. To really get that sense of humanised experience I use depictions of domestic labour quite a lot, because I think that’s where a lot of history actually happens, and it’s erased from the archive.

I’ve read that “Bidrohi” translates in English to “The Rebel” – could you share a bit about the reason for using this title for the project? 

A: “Bidrohi” references a poem by Kazi Nazrul Islam, a really famous Bangladeshi revolutionary poet. I personally feel that the poem and what it stands for is the essence of what it means to be a contemporary queer Bangladeshi artist in the modern age. The poem is about standing up for your people and your land, and for what’s right. It connects different aspects of Bangla culture, Muslim and Hindu aesthetics and things like that.

P: I’m reading this amazing book called “Disorienting Rhythms: The Politics of New Asian Dance Music”, and there’s a bit in it about a song called “Rebel Warrior” by Asian Dub Foundation that I wanted to talk about – the lyrics are really interesting and relevant. I the rebel warrior, I have risen alone with my head held high, I will only rest when the cries of the oppressed no longer reach the sky, when the sound of the sword of the oppressor no longer rings in battle, hear my war cry. I think it’s something you said in person, Mohammed, that there’s a Bengali renaissance happening. It’s nice to see because there was a huge gap in Asian art being visible in the UK, so it’s nice that this exhibition mirrors not only the original poem, but also this Asian Dub Foundation interpretation of it too.

M: I think for me, the resonance of it has been being queer Bangladeshi artists and the level of respectability politics of migrants also within the community that you have to push back against. At least in my experience, to live the life that I live and to do the work that I do, I’ve had to face some estrangement and some dispossession, and I think that the rebel connotation has echoes of independent struggle, and I think doing what you need to do to break the mould of an unjust system, that bleeds through in the personal experience of it.

How do you feel that this Bengali renaissance is presented in the UK?

M: I feel like with a lot of South Asian diasporic cultural production in the UK, there is a kind of normativity, and Indo-centrism.

P: And the homogeneity of all the cultures.

M: Exactly. Regionally, the history is not just about partition, there’s so much history that differentiates it. We’re in a moment now where our art is appearing in a more mainstream way now, but I do think what Puer’s saying with the Asian Dub Foundation is correct – we’re not the first. It’s important for our work to speak to the former waves, and to fight against this generational amnesia because it stops future generations from having to reinvent the wheel again, and we can actually get somewhere. So I think it’s a good title to both talk about the cutting edge, but also the history of Bidrohi, it’s part of a wider ancestral movement.

A: I think going back to Old Spitalfields, it feels impactful that they brought contemporary Bangladeshi artists back to the East End to show work there. It’s not just about us, it’s about the aunties walking with their kids, and them looking up at the images and feeling seen. It’s not always this really Orientalist depiction of Brown bodies in the jungle. I’m more nuanced than that. It’s so nice not to be generalised and for them to make it very Indo-centric and super Hindu nationalist. They specified that they’re bringing Bengalis to create work in an area with a Bengali history. I think that’s really cool.

Ace, the photos you displayed were taken from a series of photos “Dhaka-Sylhet-Kolkota” taken by a kids camera during your visit to Bangladesh and West Bengal, India. What brought you to using a kids camera?

A: At that moment I was really looking for a vintage Polaroid but I couldn’t find one, so I was looking at a cheap alternative to document as much  as I could throughout my trip, and I ended up stumbling upon this kids camera which prints on receipt paper. I took it with me and took a bunch of pictures on the receipt paper. I still have them in a little folder. But I just focused on the mundane, not the lavish stuff, like random statues in the streets and architecture.

Some of the best art we saw was by people who hadn’t considered themselves as artists, but just decided to make a statue of a deity on the side of the road because they felt moved by devotion to do that. There was someone selling clay pots on the side of the road, but the way they had organised them, you could have put the same thing in a gallery with white walls, and it would have been worth so much money. The best art we had seen was in the mundane, not in the galleries.

Puer, your images explore details of public and historic spaces as well as gathering places in the streets and markets in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and other areas in the region. Could you expand on the concept of memory and ideas around familiarity and object permanence?

P: Initially, I was drawn to these specific images because I make sculpture, and I was really interested in the way people make sculpture in South Asia. One of the photos is from a bazaar in Mumbai in the antiques market, and then there was one in Kolkata, where I chose to photograph a statue that was part covered outside, and it kind of felt discarded.

All the images depict some form of divine objects, and I wanted to use those images specifically in Old Spitalfields Market because I wanted it to be like those lucky cats that people have, just like a really good auspicious kind of icon to bring prosperity to the people who work in the market.

Mohammed, your work features three from the series “Under the Cloth”, an acrylic painting series illustrating dream-like domestic scenes, exploring the lives of migrants in the East London rag trade. Could you share a bit about the importance of history and context to this work?

M: A lot of the industry and the factories were running around Spitalfields and a lot of the labour in the East London rag trade was done by Bangladeshi machinists and seamstresses. The industry has wound down from the 2000s, a lot of people have moved to care work and working in restaurants and things. It’s just a testimony to that. Within the paintings, there are all these references to things that complicate the history, or expand on it.

I was drawing a lot from this oral history project that was compiled by Stepney Community Trust called “I Sewed, I Sewed, and I Sewed”, and it’s based on the oral history accounts of these seamstresses, and factory owners from these communities, and people that were living in the area. I was really inspired by that body of work. It felt important to have a record of the lived, intimate, domestic aspects of that labour.