Date of Award
Spring 5-7-2025
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Art
Degree Type
Thesis
Abstract
This thesis investigates the intersections of performance, memory, race, and erasure through the lens of feminist, decolonial, and diasporic practice. Centering the body as both archive and site of resistance, I explore how performance intervenes in dominant historical narratives by foregrounding voices and experiences that have been silenced, displaced, or deemed unarchivable. Drawing from personal experience as a South Asian Muslim woman navigating academia in the U.S., my work examines how structures suppress grief, dissent, and political witnessing—particularly when the lives in question are racialized, feminized, or marginalized.
Through installations, photographs, and time-based performances such as Aam Pata Jora Jora, What Is the Cost of Life? The Brown Pilgrim, Who Cleans After a Genocide? and Present: 0, I challenge the permanence of archives and monuments, proposing performance as a radical, embodied alternative for remembering. Each work addresses systemic violence—from colonial gender scripts and racialized policing to global genocidal silence—inviting the audience to confront their own roles as bystanders, beneficiaries, or implicated subjects. By referencing theorists such as Sara Ahmed, Gayatri Spivak, Michael Rothberg, Rebecca Schneider, I frame my practice within a critical discourse that interrogates institutional complicity and the politics of visibility.
Ultimately, this thesis proposes performance as a fugitive space where erased histories and buried voices are momentarily resurrected, where mourning itself becomes a radical act, and where survival is reframed as resistance.
Language
English
Program Chair
Tiffany Calvert
Thesis Text Advisor
Heather Bennett
Thesis Text Advisor
Monika Weiss
Faculty Mentor
Heather Bennett
Committee Member
Patricia Olynyk
Committee Member
Joe DeVera
Committee Member
Monika Weiss
Recommended Citation
HAQUE, TAHIA FARHIN, "Women, Azaadi, Shadhinota, Freedom" (2025). MFA in Visual Art. 30.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/mfa_visual_art/30
Artist's Statement
My work exists at the intersection of grief, memory, resistance, and survival—anchored in my identity as a South Asian Muslim woman navigating diasporic displacement, institutional power, and historical erasure. I center the body as both an archive and a site of resistance, using performance to challenge the rigid structures of dominant histories and institutional forgetfulness. Through embodied acts and installations, I interrogate what it means to mourn in public, to carry memory across borders, and to speak the unspeakable.
Performance, for me, is an act of rupture. It disrupts the patriarchal logic of permanence enshrined in monuments and archives, offering instead a fugitive, living space where voices silenced by race, gender, and geography can re-emerge. In works like Aam Pata Jora Jora, What Is the Cost of Life? and Present: 0, I explore the tensions between visibility and surveillance, memory and absence, personal trauma and collective grief. These pieces draw upon feminist and decolonial frameworks, engaging theorists like Sara Ahmed, Gayatri Spivak, and Rebecca Schneider, while grounding theory in lived experience.
My performances do not seek resolution; they are acts of survival and remembrance. They ask: who gets to be mourned? Whose memory is worth archiving? How do we carry the weight of justice when systems demand silence? In confronting these questions, I offer my own body—as witness, mourner, and provocateur—engaging the audience not as spectators, but as implicated subjects.
Ultimately, my practice reclaims the ephemeral as essential. It insists that performance can breathe life into erased histories, that to remember is to resist, and that even in grief, we can find a radical path toward liberation.