5 Questions with Sofiyah Ruqayah
Sofiyah Ruqayah is a Sydney-based artist working across drawing, installation, collage and painting to explore the strange territories between human and nonhuman realities. She is interested in themes of mutation, dream and spirit worlds.
Drawing upon imagined and felt connections between various bodies, presences and memories, as well as familial and cultural myths of embodiment, Sofiyah’s practice invites us to speculate on our nonhuman origins and intertwined fates.
(Sofiyah Ruqayah, Harbingers of Doom (detail), digital collage print on satin, faux fur, plywood, storm glass, dimensions variable. Photo: Kai Wasikowski, courtesy the artist)
No.1
Can you tell us a bit about how your practice came to be? Where do you see “human and nonhuman realities” (as you describe it) coming together in your Holding Patterns exhibition?
My practice started to take shape in my early 20s, at a time when I was really interested in ideas of reciprocity between humans and the environment. I was working for an environmental NGO at the time, and trying to figure out how to shift ways of thinking about our embodiment and our place in the world. I liked the idea that to be human is actually to recognise that we are in constant mutation with nonhuman communities (the microorganisms in our bodies actually outnumber our human cells 10 to 1).
My early practice reflected these ideas through processes of assemblage where human and nonhuman bodies were intertwined through the merging of collage and watercolour. I’ve since realised that those ideas of engaging with the nonhuman have always been a part of my life—encounters with nonhuman entities, apparitions and unseen worlds have a strong hold on my psyche, and Holding Patterns offers a glimpse into these kinds of encounters.
The sculptural works in this exhibition take the form of abstract bodies, each containing a glass orb through which images from my dreams can be seen. These glass objects themselves mutate, as they contain a liquid that both creates and dissolves crystals in response to temperature changes in their environment.
No.2
There seems to be a surrealist element in your body of work so far. What do you recall as your earliest aesthetic interests that connect to the work you’re making now?
I remember being mesmerised by Wangechi Mutu’s survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2013. As an art school student at the time, Mutu’s visual language resonated deeply with my own interests in mutating bodies, and her practice is the perfect balance of chaos and control, delicate and ominous, human and nonhuman. Mutu’s expansive approach to materiality has always inspired me too, working across drawing, sculpture, installation and video. One of my goals for this year was to bring my writhing bodily forms off paper and into space for the first time, and having a studio big enough to do so has been a great privilege.
No.3
What is your process when it comes to familiarising or acquainting yourself with a different medium before you make work with it?
Very haphazard! I might watch a YouTube tutorial if I’m feeling very organised, but I usually just feel my way through a new medium and figure it out as I go. It’s the same with mediums that I have used before too; I have a really bad memory so I often forget how to use watercolour even though I’ve been using it for years.
I really enjoy the process of working with a material this way though, where I can just play and observe without any attachment to an outcome or a sense of mastery. Digital collage is an example of this: I have a computer for the first time in my life and that has led to many hours of playing in Photoshop and learning as I go. The digital collages I’ve produced are quite rudimentary but I’m having a lot of fun and not taking it too seriously.
I’ve incorporated some of these digital collages into the sculptural works in Holding Patterns. Through one orb you can see a stone face vomiting a purple fountain that bleeds into a fragment of an old watercolour, or in another, a fly sits on a dead blue eel.
No.4
You are part of Woven Kolektif, a group of artists based between Australia and Indonesia who seek to explore Australian-Indonesian connections. Can you speak more to this?
Woven Kolektif began as a group of seven artists with familial ties to Indonesia. We work across a broad range of disciplines, including dance, ceramics, installation, painting, photography and video. We’ve worked on several exhibitions together over the past three years, working collaboratively as well as presenting our individual practices in conversation with each other.
Themes we’ve worked with tend to centre around community: focusing on ideas of renewal, respite and connection. At the moment we’re taking time to reflect on what it means to be tied to Indonesia, how we can learn from the past, and what our goals are for the future.
No.5
In another interview, you said that the pandemic had caused you to reassess your relationship to art: “The frenetic push of art to the digital sphere didn’t sit well with me—like it should have been the least of our collective concerns at the time—and subsequently I began to feel like nothing important was worth saying. After clocking the immense privilege that allowed me to even begin to entertain that sentiment, I started to think about what was left.” We’d love to hear more about what you discovered.
Even before the pandemic, I was feeling increasingly uneasy about how artists, especially non-Indigenous artists of colour in Australia, contribute to cultural dialogue. Admittedly, I was bored by art that centred around identity and cultural heritage—or at least, the lack of criticality around these themes.
When the pandemic hit, that sense of boredom suddenly had a lot of oxygen. Months of downtime this year have helped me reflect on my own participation in these conversations, and how I’ve played into identity politics in the past. When I said that “nothing important was worth saying”, I was starting to imagine what we, as artists, could create if we relinquish our need to say anything at all.
I revisited the Dada manifesto, remembering that Dada was a response to a time of great societal instability. And so I started to try and transform the pessimism I’d felt at the start of the year by embracing chaos and nonsense in my practice, without having to justify, rationalise or prove my worth as an artist of colour. I don’t think I’m any less pessimistic about the future as a result, but I’ve definitely let go of a lot of ways of thinking about art-making that don’t serve me anymore.
(Sofiyah Ruqayah in her studio, 2020. Photo by Jacquie Manning, courtesy Parramatta Artists’ Studios)
Holding Patterns is a four-part solo exhibition series held at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art from 9 July - 23 October 2020.
Based in Sydney, 4A is an independent not-for-profit organisation that fosters excellence and innovation in contemporary culture through the commissioning, presentation, documentation and research of contemporary art. 4A presents various programs throughout Australia and Asia to ensure that contemporary art plays a central role in understanding and developing the dynamic relationship between Australia and the wider Asian region.
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