Aqsa Arif: Raindrops of Rani

Arif reflects on the stark contrast between this global spectacle and the overlooked realities of the community it disrupted. The exhibition becomes a meditation on the psychic and familial consequences of such displacements, especially for those still negotiating belonging in a place that promises refuge but often feels alien.

The work draws on the tragic figure of Heer from the Punjabi love story Heer Ranjha. Arif reimagines her as Heera, a displaced mother navigating life in a Scottish council flat with her young daughter after a flood destroys their home. Through this hybrid fantasy, Arif stages a layered narrative of a mother and daughter adapting differently and unequally to an environment marked by indifference and hostility.

This external world is embodied by menacing clowns, a surreal but deliberate choice. Arif recontextualises the clown by referencing the local geography of Prospecthill Circus, where ‘circus’ colloquially names the area. This term, combined with the unsettling clown from the Paint advert, creates a layered symbol of unease. The clown stands in for the absurdity, unpredictability, and hostility of bureaucratic systems and social landscapes asylum seekers must navigate. Once figures of humour or innocence, these clowns are transformed into grotesque threats, mirroring how displaced individuals often experience their surroundings as unfamiliar, distorted, and dangerous.

Hair becomes a contested site, a marker of care, resistance, identity, and generational divide. In Arif’s work, the braid transcends hairstyle to become a vessel of memory and mourning, connection and conflict, holding the fragile tension between heritage and adaptation.

Arif collaborated with her mother, Tahira Arif, to create the textile braids, an extension of their long-standing creative bond. A skilled maker in her own right, Tahira brings a deep knowledge of craft, care, and cultural memory. Their collaboration reflects the work’s central themes: the passing down of traditions between generations, the intimacy of maternal rituals, and the ways memory and identity are held quite literally in the hands.

Together, these elements fill the gallery with an interplay of print, moving image, and tactile, glossy surfaces, blending memory and fiction and inviting audiences to journey with Heera through psychological landscapes shaped by displacement, cultural assimilation, and imagination.

Arif’s practice centres on world-building as a means to navigate the emotional terrain of assimilation, moving fluidly between Scottish and South Asian worlds. Her work transforms vulnerability into myth, reconfiguring personal history into a shared visual language. In this hybrid world, fantasy becomes a way to articulate the inexpressible: the feeling of being out of place in a space meant to offer safety, the confusion of growing up between cultures, and the silent negotiations between mother and daughter in a household shaped by loss, longing, and adaptation.

Aqsa Arif's Raindrops of Rani is supported by Creative Scotland's Open Fund for Individuals, Print Clan, Brick + Mortar, and Too Happy Studios.

 

 

Acknowledgements

Aqsa Arif would like to acknowledge and thank the following for their contributions in supporting the production of the work:

KitnKat Productions, Tahira Arif, Nuala Abramson, Arianna Mele, Rachel Toye, Andrew Milk, Jordan McQuaid, James Harrison, Sally Mairs, Namhara Byron Low, and James Boyer Smith

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