Qasim RIza Shaheen, Khusra: Stains and Stencils, 2019, Print.
QASIM RIZA SHAHEEN
Qasim Riza Shaheen (born 1971) is a British artist and writer based in Manchester. Working across participatory performance, installation, film and photography, Shaheen's practice explores memory, notions of beauty, sexuality, love and, more broadly, fundamental concerns about human nature.
"In films, video performances, photographs and mixed-media drawings, Qasim Riza Shaheen presents his affecting reflections on love and loss...For him, self-portraiture is more a matter of imaginative self-creation than any pretence of authentic self-definition...His enactments of queer romance, straight social alienation, and the universal melodramas of unrequited desire are choreographed with painful sensitivity."
Shaheen's work has shown in the group show Text Embodied in May 2013. His solo show “In a world where there are five women I am the seventh” was on view in May 2012. Qasim Riza Shaheen's performance work titled Misplaced Memoirs was part of Twelve Gates Arts' performance art biennial pilot program perform[art]ive in Philadelphia in 2015. His most recent solo show, The Beetroot Robe, was on view at 12G Summer 2021.
PRESS
ArtNow in conversation with Qasim Riza Shaheen