Atufa Rais, Tayyab Hussain & Reshma Khatoon

About the Actant

© Atufa Rais, Tayyab Hussain & Reshma Khatoon Atufa Rais is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Ekistics at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Based in Delhi, she started her academic practice by painting creative landscapes. She now works with the articulation of spaces. Through her practice she redefines the traditional values of ‘how a landscape should be’. In her work, space plays a key role. She analyses and calculates the unknown dimensions of creative landscapes. Her works are executed as images, video stills and photomontages of interventions and landscapes.

Tayyab Hussain is a multidisciplinary artist. He completed his Bachelor’s Degree from Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh and his Master’s Degree from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. In the early years of his academic practice Tayyab consciously drew inspiration from theories of Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalysts and incorporated his own symbols and motifs to create a unique vocabulary for dialogue and expression. He boosts his practice by consuming contexts and references from language, culture, art history, domestic spaces and religion. His compositions are at best an enactment foregrounding the cosmic theatre of desires, taboos and inhibitions. Text is excessively used throughout his practice. He has displayed his work at several platforms including Kochi Biennale, FICA and so on. His performance pieces include ‘Bed Relation’, ‘New Thebes’, ‘Twenty Six Sculptures’, ‘Joota’, ‘Musaafah’ etc.

Reshma is a visual artist from Delhi. She has completed her studies from Jamia Millia Islamia. She works on various types of narratives. Her illustrations capture an expressionistic sense. She earlier worked on nostalgia through painting her grannies and stories from childhood.

© Atufa Rais, Tayyab Hussain & Reshma Khatoon Silver Fish is a process-based installation by Atufa Rais and Tayyab Hussain about constructing a labyrinth of language. The physical space will be transformed into a compact, accessible labyrinth of about ten thousand books or more (of random subjects) one can feed on while playing the role of a silverfish. These books, texts, catalogs, archives and manuscripts will be collected from various personal libraries and collections. The setup can also be seen as a performance where visitors identify themselves as silverfish.