Ort Gallery is delighted to present People of the Garáṇ, a solo exhibition featuring a new body of work by artist Haseebah Ali, showcasing objects from MIAH Foundation’s Kashmir Collection.     

This exhibition is curated by Aaisha Akhtar and Dr Farah Nazir and is produced in collaboration between Ort Gallery and MIAH Foundation. 

People of the Garáṇ is an exploration of Azad Kashmiri stories, memories, and cultural practices that have existed beyond public records and archives. This exhibition invites us to reflect on both real and imagined space between the village and the city; from an agrarian past to a post-industrial present; and the ways in which rural village life textures diasporic geographies and peoples in urban Britain. 

Inspired by the artefacts from MIAH’s collection, as well as everyday images, art practices, and traditions from her upbringing, Hassebah employs print, photography, textiles, calligraphy, illumination, sculpture and mixed media to trace connections between labour, care, migration, craft, and the remaking of home. Through these forms, Haseebah’s work draws attention to the internal and external worlds of men and women in her family across generations: their bodily labour, emotional endurance, and inherited practices. The artworks offer a way of understanding and connecting the Azad Kashmiri community to their own memories and traditions.    

This exhibition is a contemplation on space, not just as a physical entity, but as something lived, remembered, and remade - a notion that is intrinsic to the cultural legacy of a community whose traditions and practices are often understood in form but not in meaning. 

Ultimately, People of the Garáṇ is a visual account imbued with tenderness and a desire to celebrate, interrogate and document the cultural legacy and textures of Azad Kashmiri diasporic life. 

People of the Garan was made possible with support from Arts Council England. 

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Haseebah Ali is an artist and arts educator based in Birmingham. Haseebah’s practice is a socially engaged one and spans across illustration, photography, sculpture, textiles with a specialised focus on relief printing.

Having obtained a BA in Illustration in 2018, Haseebah’s work has since been exhibited in a number of galleries including New Art Exchange (2019 - 2020), Ikon Gallery (2021), Eastside Projects (2023), Saatchi Gallery (2024), Soho Revue (2024) and more. Her artwork has also been featured in various publications, including Thawrah (2023), Yellowzine (2022) and Creative Alliance (2022). Outside of this, she was a guest judge for BBYA (2022) and was recently awarded a DYCP via which she has explored traditional art forms employed in the global south such as Japanese woodblock, paper making and woodcarving to develop her practice as a printmaker, allowing her to transition from creating 2D work to more sculptural, experimental 3D work.

Her artistic aim is to create art that not only speaks to people, but to make work that continues to educate and challenge both audiences and herself.

Aaisha Akhtar is a Birmingham-based curator, producer, writer, researcher, and facilitator. She is currently the Artistic Lead at Ort Gallery where she works with artists and creatives supporting them in their professional development and artistic practice via warmth. She oversees all aspects of programming, including but not limited to curating the exhibitions programme as well as Hayati - a Muslim-centred open mic event in Birmingham showcasing poets and performers from within the community. Outside of her work at Ort Gallery, she is currently a custodian at Birmingham Resistance Library and is working on a series of essays.

She has previously worked with Birmingham Repertory Theatre via the Furnace Project (2018) and was one of the co-organisers of the Literature Must Fall Festival (2019) and JAAG Festival (2023). She has also co-led Literary No F*cks, a reading group which seeks to demystify and desacralise literature. More recently, she has worked with Grand Union as a Programme Producer (2023 - 2024) and has had an essay published with Print and Matter (2023) where she explores what it would mean to reimagine libraries as radical sites of language learning and community building in relation to her mother tongue of Pahari-Pothwari. 

Her interests include but are not limited to anti-colonial / alternative and care-centred approaches to making, producing, and engaging with art and literature; as well as pop culture, the gaze, disability, language, libraries, love and emotion.

Farah Nazir’s research interests are in the grammar of South Asian languages, multilingualism, language identity and attitudes, and language creativity. Farah did her PhD on the grammar of the Pahari-Pothwari-Mirpuri language and continues to work on the grammar, as well as promoting the language and identity of Azad Kashmiris via her writing, and literature and language festivals. She was the co-director of the first JAAG (2023) Panjabi and Pahari-Pothwari Language and Literature Festival. She has written several articles exploring her personal journey as a community member and an academic linguist, and linguistic creativity within the British South Asian diaspora community. She casually writes poetry in her language, which is a place of freedom for her to connect to the words and worlds of her elders, her memories, and to the shared collective history of the British Azad Kashmiri community. 

She is currently a researcher at University of York where she is supporting a large research project entitled ‘Lost for Words: Cognitive Ageing And Language Control in Bilingual Older Adults with and without Cognitive Impairment'. The project explores how bilinguals navigate language use as they age within multilingual communities in the North of England, focusing on Pahari/Pothwari/Mirpuri speakers as well as other Pakistani/Kashmiri heritage languages. 

She continues to navigate and challenge the hierarchical structures within and outside of academia with care, forgiveness, and hope. 

Ort Gallery is a visual arts and poetry organisation based in Birmingham. They are on a social mission to redefine contemporary visual arts by rejecting the sector’s exclusivity, centring access and equity, and providing inclusive high quality art experiences. They support this mission with a care-centred approach (aka Warmth) and give artists, team members and participants autonomy over their projects.

Ort believes everyone should have access to high quality art experiences and aims to meet this standard by providing exhibition and professional development opportunities to artists, creatives and community members across all backgrounds.

They place Warmth at the heart of all their work. Ort recognises that galleries can be sites of oppression which centre and reproduce white normative and elitist ways of ‘being’ under the supposed guise of neutrality. They are interested in challenging this head on; whilst also committing to creating space for local artists and marginalised community groups across Birmingham and beyond to play an active role in shaping such practices, in the hopes of transforming ourselves, our city, and the wider arts ecology.

The Museum of Islamic Arts & Heritage (MIAH) Foundation is a charitable organisation established in Birmingham. MIAH aim to promote awareness and understanding of the history, arts, culture and heritage of the Islamic world, as well as the history of Muslims in Britain and Europe through exhibitions, education, workshops and events. Their long-term objective is to raise funds to establish the UK’s first independent museum dedicated to the arts and heritage of Muslims and the Islamic world. They are working towards increasing the representation and engagement of people of colour and minority groups of Muslim heritage with the arts, culture and heritage sector through greater provision that considers both their faith and cultural identities.