FLAHERTY NYC
PRESENTS SEASON 24 | FALL 2022
still from Zinnia Naqvi’s THE TRANSLATION IS APPROXIMATE courtesy of the filmmaker
film notes
Zinnia Naqvi
SEAVIEW
2015, 12 mins, digital
Seaview is an experimental film which combines home video and captured footage from Karachi, Pakistan. Naqvi travels back to her family’s country of origin to compare childhood memories of this place with lived experience. In the first sequence, she shows video footage of her first trip to Clifton Beach in Karachi. The accompanying text describes her visit to the same beach seventeen years later, and the difficulties in trying to document this place, both as an image maker and as a woman.
Naqvi confronts her own personal struggle of being caught between the ideals of Western and Eastern societies. Rather than affirming any single understanding of Pakistani society, she constantly complicates her own depiction by questioning the relationship between subject, author and viewer. She overlaps text, audio conversations, and testimonials which often contradict the paired imagery in each sequence. This film attempts to reveal the complications and hostilities of translating culture across time and seas.
Zinnia Naqvi
THE TRANSLATION IS APPROXIMATE
2021, 11 mins, digital
This video focuses a conversation that Naqvi witnessed between her aunt and a domestic worker over financial matters. For many reasons — the ambivalence of the situation, the respective socioeconomic positions of the two women involved in the scene, and the very nature of the recording, which careened between documentary and voyeurism — these images have long haunted Naqvi.
In the Translation is Approximate (2021), Naqvi retrieves the original footage that she shot in 2013 and traces back her thoughts about what motivated her to revisit this material. This short video both provides insight into her approach and fundamentally questions both the viewer’s relationship with truth and the dilemma between fiction and documentary.
Zinnia Naqvi
FARZANA
2021, 34 mins, digital
Inspired by a true story, Farzana (2021) is a short narrative film which revolves around the relationship of two middle-aged women and how they navigate their work in the home. Charmaine is a psychotherapist who works from home, and she hires Nasreen as a domestic worker to help her maintain her household. Nasreen is a recent migrant who is dealing with financial precarity. When there is a crisis in Nasreen’s family, she asks for assistance from Charmaine, but lack of trust between the two women results in hostility and conflict. We see all of this through the eyes of Zinnia, Charmaine's niece who is visiting her aunt and decides to record what she observes secretly. This film has evolved into a story which addresses the politics of class, women’s roles, and domestic labour, while also addressing the burden of bearing witness and documenting.
filmmaker
Zinnia Naqvi (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work examines issues of colonialism, cultural translation, language, and gender through the use of photography, video, the written word, and archival material. Recent projects have included archival and re-staged images, experimental documentary films, video installations, graphic design, and elaborate still-lives. Her artworks often invite the viewer to consider the position of the artist and the spectator, as well as analyze the complex social dynamics that unfold in front of the camera.
Naqvi’s work has been shown across Canada and internationally. She is a recipient of the 2019 New Generation Photography Award organized by the the National Gallery of Canada and was an honourable mention at the 2017 Karachi Biennale in Pakistan. Naqvi is member of EMILIA-AMALIA Working Group, an intergenerational feminist collective. Naqvi received a BFA in Photography Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University. She currently teaches part-time at the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University.
