Hamja Ahsan

Interview by Florence Low.

 

Hamja Ahsan book Shy Radicals: the Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert (Bookworks 2017) can be purchased £9.95 here

 

He can be found on Instagram and twitter: @shyradicals @hamjaahsan

 

The award-winning work The Aspergistan Referendum is in Ljubljana Biennial curated by Slavs and Tartars which runs until 29th September 2019, touring to Poland Warsaw in March and April 2020.

Shades of Noir, UK spoke to artist, activist and curator Hamja Ahsan, co-founder of DIY Cultures and author of Shy Radicals: the Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert, on the occasion of him being awarded the Grand Prize at the Ljubljana Biennial, ‘Crack-Up – Crack Down’, about his award and the Biennale, the importance of the DIY scene and zines in decolonising and antiracism work, and his influences.

 

We would like to to thank Hamja for taking the time to speak with us.

 

Congratulations on winning the Grand Prize at the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts in June of this year! Can you tell me about your work?

 

The curators Slavs and Tartars commissioned my piece due to their love of my recent book Shy Radicals: the Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert. The piece is a referendum based on the fictional state of Aspergistan. People across the state can vote to separate into their own state of shy, autistic spectrum and introverted people. The ballot paper was modelled on the Brexit ballot paper.

 

Slovenia was the first nation to separate from the communist federation of Yugoslavia, so had more context on independence movements. The vote is still going on across the city, and the result will be announced at the end of the Biennale on 29th September. The Slovenes appear to be so proud to be part of the EU, the flag is around the city – in fact, my initial plan was to replace the EU flag with the flag of Aspergistan. As part of the award, you get a solo exhibition in the next Biennale and a residency.

 

The Biennale was one of the first meeting points for Black, African, Asian and Latin America artists.

 

We need to recover that history for British art institutions. I have encouraged institutions like the Stuart Hall library to document this history of Slovenia in empowerment for the global south. Recent conferences like Axis of Solidarity at Tate Modern have been taking note of this.

 

How do you describe the work that you do, how do you define yourself?

 

Since winning the Grand Prize, I have been describing myself as an artist first, but I used to describe myself as a curator, and I was an activist first for about a decade.

 

Winning the award, was like a phoenix from the ashes moment for my artist career. I had wanted to be an artist since I was three years old, but between graduation and now there have been lots of periods of depression, the standard post-graduate life.

 

It can be really difficult for art students. I wrote a book called Shy Radicals: the Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert, which is about a revolutionary political party, like the Black Panthers but for shy people. I’ve been touring it around the world, to the Netherlands, Slovenia, Germany, New York, the invites keep coming.

 

My dream is to be the commander-in-chief of the Shy Radicals movement. I used to edit and commission but now the book and its vocabulary seem to have inspired a dozen new artworks from the collective Academics Against Networking to new artists books and sculptures, by others in all various media. It’s become its own generative creative trail. I work in all formats, including performance, archiving, video. Concept-led stuff.

 

I founded DIY Cultures, which is all about changing white domination in zine culture.

 

It’s been transformed, it’s no longer a white hipster thing.

 

I’m a campaigner for civil liberties, against the war on terror. I studied under Professor Anne Tallentire at Central Saint Martins who represented Ireland in the Venice Biennale, she was a very important person in my life. I went as a mature student and she saw something exceptional in me, she really believed in me. She knows when to be kind and when to be critical. The 4D pathways in the BA Fine Art was a very conceptually pioneering system.

What has influenced you in your work on DIY Cultures and Shy Radicals?

 

As a student, I’ve been very influenced by Third Text journal founded by Rasheed Araeen, its terms for racial equality and a more inclusive culture.

 

Conceptual art movements, prisoner writing. I’ve been involved in Free Talha campaign for eight years for my brother who was incarcerated, for which I was shortlisted for a Liberty Human Rights award. The way that prisoners think about the world and power and the state, prisoners under colonial powers in particular, had a deep influence on me, more than any academic theory. The Manic Street Preachers, their early work, the Holy Bible album, that’s how I got into zine culture at 13 years old.

 

The subculture of fanzines of the 1990s around the Manic Street Preachers also resulted in a project by Jeremy Deller around the time he won the Turner Prize. That got me into socialist politics, inclusion, at an early age. I come from a Bengali background and am inspired by Bengali avant-garde films, like Satyajit Ray, Aparna Sen, Ritwik Ghatak for example. Living in London inspires me, the hybridities of so many different lives, different worlds, different ways of being.

 

What is the importance of DIY and zine culture to you?

 

Contemporary life, in general, is bureaucratic, there is too much administration in every part of our lives. I never predicted that zine culture would be as big as it is now. I was into it before the internet, in the 90s. But it’s had a huge upsurge, like vinyl; people have digital fatigue. The Internet hasn’t killed zine culture, people are looking for slowness, authenticity, company.

 

Alternative ways of achieving racial equality that aren’t what art theorist Saharat Maharaj called ‘multicultural managerialism’. There’s an opportunity for connection, it’s more spontaneous, there’s less red tape. The art establishment for what is called ‘Black art’, it has become too obsessed with grant applications and big capital, it has lost its grassroots origins. Zine culture is more immediate.

 

During my MA, all my tutors and guest tutors were white, so I was very encouraged to see the Decolonising the Curriculum zine; that student-led activity, I wish I had that.

 

The artworld is very far from being an equally representative place, but a lot of academics are my heroes; Edward Said, Ella Shohat’s Unthinking Eurocentrism had an enormous impact on me. I wanted to be an academic or a scholar-activist, but now I feel academia has become too much in its own bubble. One of the workshops we do at DIY cultures is ‘Turn your PhD into a Zine’; we encourage people to bring along their thesis and think about how it could be reinvented via zine culture to communicate more outside of that bubble.

 

The format of Shy Radicals is a performance piece of writing that I hope will shake up the dry plain prose of academia. Why do we assume that academic writing is the only way of conveying truths? The way a comedian speaks is a truth methodology.

 

That’s why Shy Radicals is in so many different formats. Of all the works published by book works, Shy Radicals is the one that has the biggest following outside of it. Zines don’t entirely belong to the art world. The artworld is still exclusionary, but zines build bridges. Everything can become ossified, there are ways in which the market creates formulaic staleness – how many times can you see Owen Jones speak, for example?

 

Have you seen these worlds change at the all-around representation of shy people, neurodivergent people, people of colour?

 

What are your hopes for the future?

 

I think things have improved a lot in ten years. But in terms of cultural institutions, the most diverse places in the world are prisons and the unemployment queue.

 

We have Trump in power, and a resurgence of ugly forms of neofascism and we still live in a white supremacist world. DIY Cultures has an enormous impact on change and the makeup of creative cultures. We are remapping the world.

 

We have connections and exchange to Tanzania, Uganda, Malaysia, they are coalitions of hope. The only problem is that it took up all my life. It really pushed me to my limit, it was a lot of sacrifice and work, but it might happen again in the future. We are thinking of making an anthology.

 

In terms of neurodivergent inclusions, there have been some really positive movements in the trade union movement with a branch within the revitalised Corbyn Labour party called Neurodivergent Labour led by aspie poet Janine Booth. In terms of arts, the dyspraxis performance artist Daniel Olivier at Queen Mary University has played a key role in bringing many neurodivergent artists together in an unofficial national network with programming many key events in Harold Pinter Theatre which I have been a part of.

 

The Autism Arts festival at Kent University programmed by Shaun May has been a great Biennial model. The format of the festival allows space for stimming and a three colour badge system that allows the audience to be left alone, free from small talk. It’s amazing how the motions and regulations of these movements and events are so similar to the fiction laws I draft in my book Shy Radicals in envisioning the Shy Peoples’ Republic of Aspergistan. My hope for the future is the decolonial Introvert revolution, of course.

 

I consider myself on a never-ending world tour to overthrow white-supremacist, extrovert-supremacy.

 

I will stop touring Britain, Europe and the world, of course… once these systems are overthrown.

 

What advice would you give your younger self, or to other artists?

 

Cities like London and New York are excessively saturated. There your head feels like a traffic jam. That’s why I would encourage artists to come to more chilled cities like Rotterdam and Ljubljana. That encouragement is really important for your morale as an artist.

 

I’m living in The Hague at the moment where there is a large Muslim presence; before I went to the Netherlands, I always thought that London was the centre of the world, that there was nothing like it, but the things that exist in London exist elsewhere.

 

Somethings that are British are globalised, like Premiership football, so I get a sense of homeliness here. I meet a lot of British artists based abroad, because of austerity and cuts. In terms of state encouragement, other countries are far more generous in terms of what they offer, they recognise the financial importance of art as well as cultural importance. So I would encourage students to look elsewhere. London isn’t the centre of the world, I had that fallacy for a long time in my life.