I’ve always described myself as an activist filmmaker. The desire to illuminate stories from the periphery, to create dialogue, challenge pieties, and disturb oppressive systems is why I became a filmmaker. Community projects, where diverse groups of people congregate, exchange ideas and transform one another, are also a form of art. So are collabs with other artists and activists. Recent projects I’ve been involved in.
Join us for a conversation between Shirly Bahar and Mara Ahmed about their recent scholarly and creative work related to oppression and the body. Bahar’s recent book, “Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine: Performance, the Body, the Home,” and Ahmed’s upcoming film, “The Injured Body,” both explore how colonialism, marginalization, and daily mental and emotional stresses from racism and othering impact the body.
A poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translated from the Urdu and read by Mara Ahmed, with sound design by Darien Lamen: Dasht-e-Tanhai (The Desert of Loneliness) or Yaad (Memory) has always moved me, its words and metaphors like pearls strung together with elegant ease. It embodies Faiz’s style of writing: filled with glorious ideas of beauty and social justice but always fluid, unencumbered, songful.
Honored to engage in conversation with the brilliant Uzma Aslam Khan about her new book, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali, on June 28th at McNally Jackson Seaport in NYC. Beautifully written and part of the important process of decolonizing history and literature, Uzma’s book brings to life revolutions that have been erased and forgotten, and exposes the mechanics of colonial oppression.
Join us for a rally activated by the war on Ukraine that condemns all wars, military occupations, and racist violence. This is an opportunity to be in community with diverse voices speaking their truth.
The following is a portion of the correspondence between Mara Ahmed and Claudia Pretelin. Ahmed is an interdisciplinary artist and activist filmmaker based on Long Island, New York. Claudia is an art historian, independent researcher, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles, California. Their correspondence is a collage of text, images, and references both literary and cultural. It is intimate and global, straddling distances between Mexico, Pakistan, Belgium and the US.
Pleased to return to the Witness Palestine Film Festival, on Sunday June 13 at 3pm, to interview filmmaker Mats Grorud and the Chair of the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS, Dr. Dina Matar. We will be talking about ‘The Tower.’
A 50-minute presentation (including film clips) that talks about racial microaggressions through the lens of my upcoming film, The Injured Body (slated to be released later this year). The presentation will be followed by a 10-minute exercise (sparked by a multimedia piece involving dance, music, film footage and text), and we will conclude with a 15-minute group discussion that parses the group’s responses.
Taught an online class to University of Rochester students on ‘Islamic Feminisms | Alternative Life-worlds | Decoloniality’ for a course on the History of Feminisms.
It used to be that borders were formed naturally, by oceans and mountains, carved out by the physical contours of the earth’s surface. There was something poetic about these landforms, extending from foothills and valleys, to plains and plateaus, all the way to seafloors. They were shaped by wind and water erosion, pushed up by the collision of tectonic plates, forged by volcanic eruptions, sandblasted and weathered over millions of years. They were substantive, grounded in history. The borders that came out of the crumbling of empires, in the 20th century, were different. Cartographic inventions meant to divvy up world resources and power, divorced from indigenous logic or priorities.
This presentation will approach the subject of racism in America by focusing on micro-aggressions. Activist filmmaker, Mara Ahmed, will talk about her new documentary, ‘The Injured Body’ which is inspired by Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen: An American Lyric.’ She will show clips from interviews with a diverse group of women of color who share their experiences and discuss the cumulative effect of slights, slips of the tongue, as well as intentional offensives.
Ahmed’s maternal family is originally from Gurgaon, India, a city 20 miles outside the Indian capital New Delhi. At the time of the Partition, Ahmed’s mother was only 5 years old but, according to the artist, her mother “has vivid memories of her home in Gurgaon – the hand woven beds (with mosquito nets) that would be placed outside to temper summer nights, the plays that her older brother and his friends would stage, the swing that her father got installed in the central, open-air atrium of the house. This was the happy landscape of her childhood. She has never been able to go back.”
Presentation at First Unitarian Church of Rochester on ‘Islamophobia is Racism’ (part of the ‘Race, Racism and Relationship’ series at First Unitarian Church).
