Farihah Aliyah Shah

Looking for Lucille is an ongoing series explores the strength and validity of memory and oral history as alternative forms of research. Farihah Shah’s family is from Guyana, South America, and, like many postcolonial people, it is difficult for the artist to trace her exact lineage. The absence of documentation about her maternal grandmother adds to the increasing void she feels in her own identity, which reflects Guyana’s complex and multilayered culture.

This series incorporates a combination of found historical images of Guyana, recent photographs of the artist’s grandmother’s various homes (in North and South America), text, and framed material with a small needlepoint intervention that speaks to Guyana’s rivers. It also includes a soundscape to recreate her grandmother’s archive. For Shah, this work is fundamentally an act of reclaiming agency over her personal narrative through an exploration of her family’s history.

Farihah Aliyah Shah (1989) is a lens-based artist living in Toronto, Canada. She explores how the colonial gaze continues to have an impact on her and other postcolonial bodies’ identity formation, and actively strives to use her platform as an artist to be a catalyst for positive social change. Farihah Aliyah Shah has exhibited in galleries in Finland, Germany, Scotland, South Korea, and Canada.