Programme 2

The second part of Alia Syed’s retrospective programme shifts to digital projection, bringing together a series of recent works that reflect on the filmmaker’s Asian-Scottish upbringing in Glasgow. Points of Departure —2014— was made in the context of an artist residency at the BBC archives in Scotland. Exploring themes of personal and collective memory through Syed’s own relationship to the city of Glasgow, the film attempts to unravel the threads of memory held within a tablecloth retrieved whilst the filmmaker cleared her elderly father’s house. Her father’s presence also looms large on Snow —2019—, where Syed reappropriates footage shot by her father on a snowy day in the winter of 1995/1996, at a time when they were not speaking to one another. Snow blends different temporalities —of the original footage, of Syed’s first watching in 2017 and her subsequent viewings in 2019— time and repetition shifting the filmmaker’s assumptions about the images and her late father, who is both present and absent. Clippy —2016— hones a moving image poem out of the personal reminiscences of Mr Ghulam Rasul Tahir and Mr Mohammed Ali Azad, who worked for the Glasgow Bus Corporation, whilst the programme concludes with an excerpt from The Dhabba —2025—, a new work produced in the context of Syed’s 2025 exhibition in Glasgow The Ring in the Fish. It explores the role that the imagination holds in migration, drawing from storytelling and collected oral narratives from the South Asian diaspora that arrived in Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970s.

María Palacios Cruz