Nurul Huda Rashid in conversation with Syaheedah Iskandar
Thu 11 Jul 2024, 7.30pm to 9pm
Workshop Space, Objectifs
Free admission. Please RSVP here
In 2012, Nurul Huda Rashid was part of Objectifs’ Shooting Home photography mentorship programme, creating her first work on Muslim women, Hijab/Her (2012). This charted her 10-year practice of looking, studying, and collecting images of Muslim women. Having made photographs, her attention shifted towards images in archives and online, assembling and annotating them as ways of responding to repeated themes and tropes. As part of the Objectifs artist residency in 2018, she began on her series Women in War (2016-2020), unpacking how images are circulated through news media and the algorithmic logic of search engines.
This led to her PhD research in 2019, which critically examines Muslim women images from the daguerreotype camera in the early 19th century to today’s data turn where the image undergoes new ways of algorithmic correlation and circulation. Extending on the theory of visuality, Nurul’s research maps photographic theory from the camera to AI, discussed through important contexts of Orientalist photography, Sharbat Gula, the Google, Baidu, and Yandex search engines, and how a data feminist framework can be activated to respond against the discrimination of an algorithmic visuality. Nurul will share lessons from her artistic practice alongside her academic research, illuminating the importance of a pedagogical approach to thinking and doing photography.
In her return home to Objectifs, Nurul’s talk will be done in-conversation with Syaheedah Iskandar, Assistant Curator at Singapore Art Museum, highlighting critical insight into the role of images in visual culture and what it means to create in-situ.
About Nurul Huda Rashid
Nurul Huda Rashid is a researcher, writer, and has recently completed her PhD in Cultural Studies in Asia at NUS. Her dissertation analyses images of Muslim women from the camera to AI via processes of automation, augmentation, and annotation. Her research stems from artistic works Hijab/Her (2012) and Women in War (2016-2020), which engage with images of Muslim women through intersections of gender and violence and politics of the visual. Her more recent work wanita kami/unknown women (2021) expands on her exploration of annotation as pedagogy and will be developed in future work. Nurul hopes to adopt a cat someday.
About Syaheedah Iskandar
Syaheedah Iskandar is Assistant Curator at Singapore Art Museum. She works with vernacular ideas of seeing, thinking, and being. Drawing from Southeast Asia’s visual culture(s), she is interested in the entanglements between the unseen, the hypervisual, and their translations from material to new media practices. She holds a MA in History of Art and Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.