In his video installations, filmmaker and creative director Kazim Rashid interrogates cultural trauma—encompassing individual and collective experience in times of geo-political crisis—and the themes of identity and conflict. He often employs the technique of split screens in his work to present different ideas together.
Read MoreIn his first film, 2001: Pressure Makes Diamonds (2018), Rashid divided the screen into nine squares that showed found footage revolving around three events from 2001: United Kingdom boxing champion Prince Naseem's first and only loss; the Oldham race riots; and the 9/11 attacks. The artist, who was born in England to Pakistani-Kenyan parents and whose father was attacked in the riots, sought to examine 2001 as a year that drastically transformed the perception and self-image of South Asian communities. Writing for Dazed in 2018, the artist recalled growing up in a climate that seemed to embrace British-Asian culture—with the mainstream success of musicians such as Punjabi MC and Talvin Singh—until the turn of the century.
Conflict—both personal and collective—is a continuous theme in Rashid's films. His second work, Exit to Al-Haram (2019), began as a home movie to document his grandmother's journey to Mecca. As the family was preparing for the trip, however, the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul triggered political unrest in Saudi Arabia; as a result, his grandmother's passport could not be issued in time. After travelling in her stead, the artist gathered the footage he had taken to create Exit, where he juxtaposed scenes of money or technology with those of prayer to allude to the commodification of religious devotion.
Introspection was at the centre of Nothing Looks The Same at Night (2019), a video installation that also lent its title to Rashid's solo presentation at The Third Line, Dubai, in 2019. The work shows a performance by Ziggy Ama Idir Iman, interrupted partially by a clip from Mary Harron's 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol, which portrays radical feminist Valerie Solanas' attempt to murder Andy Warhol in 1968. In the work, the artist considered the notion of night as an intimate and transformative space.
Rashid is the founder of ENDLESSLOVESHOW, which was established in 2016 to provide artistic and creative consultation to fashion, art, and music brands. Clients have included Absolut, adidas, Business of Fashion, i-D Magazine, and NIKE. Attesting to his collaborative practice, the artist worked with London-based artist Lotte Andersen to organise the moving-image symposium and party The Lovers Table—featuring works by Giles Duley, Ayo Akingbade, Sean Frank, and Bafic, among others—at Sheffield Doc/Fest in 2019.
Rashid's films have been screened as part of group exhibitions including Programme 12 at Sharjah Institute for Theatrical Arts in 2019 and 2001: Pressure Makes Diamonds at Rich Mix's Mezzanine Gallery, London, in 2018.
Biography by Ocula | 2019
