Afrah Shafiq: Nobody Knows For Certain

Afrah Shafiq’s multimedia game Nobody Knows for Certain draws on Soviet illustrated children’s books that were widely translated and available in India—highlighting a little-known chapter of Cold War-era cultural exchange. India and the Soviet Union (USSR) maintained cordial relations and strong cultural ties, after India’s independence in 1947. By the mid-1950s, cultural diplomacy between India and the USSR accelerated, formalised by the 1960 Cultural Ties Agreement. Russian ballet and circus performances toured Indian cities and were broadcast frequently on state television. Russian publications like the Soviet Land magazine were published in thirteen Indian languages. One product of this exchange was an abundance of richly illustrated Soviet children’s books featuring Soviet fairytales and folk stories. The books, easily available in big cities and small towns across India from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, shaped many childhood memories and are now the subject of a thriving subculture of collectors across South Asia, attached to the political imaginary tied to these stories, where vast state ambitions redistributed the land fairly, raised sprawling factories and launched people into outer space. Nobody Knows For Certain is an anthology of stories developed through a field research fellowship with the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, alongside an archive Shafiq has built of Soviet children’s books across Indian languages and oral testimonies gathered during her research. Sitting between interactive fiction, documentary and point-and-click adventure games, the work invites players to collect books virtually, find portals from one tale to the next and move through archival findings and historical backdrops that trace how two seemingly disparate lands were closely tied to one another. The pictorial game draws connections between illustrations of Soviet children’s books and older forms of visual storytelling, including Lubok chapbooks, lacquer miniatures, folk embroidery and Volga lace, as well as art and design movements such as socialist realism, avant-garde graphic design, constructivism and geometric abstraction. About the artist Afrah Shafiq (b. 1989) is a multimedia artist living and working in Goa, India. Using the process of research as an artistic playground, Shafiq’s work emerges from long-term engagements with institutional and informal archives. Her work evolves from practices of re-organising, plotting and classifying to rupture existing narratives, ‘search’ for the invisible, and create subversive, speculative ways of looking at the familiar. Drawing from remix culture, she is interested in creating hybrid forms that often bring together animation, text, code, sound and the hand-made to create interactive, simulated atmospheres. Research, Script, Animation and Art: Afrah Shafiq Programmer: Kushal Neil Lead Animator: Piyush Verma Additional Animation: Eeshani Mitra Original Score and Music Production: Rushad Mistry and Zohran Miranda Sound Design and Game Audio Implementation: Horacio Valdiveso Project curators: Iaroslav Volovod and Valentin Diaconov Garage Field Research team: Oxana Polyakova, Daria Bobrenko and Ivan Yarygin This project was created with the support of the Garage Field Research program of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow) for the Garage Digital platform. SEE ALL EVENTS