Cultural equity in white space: the visibility of diaspora cultures (2020)

By

Zanib Rasool, Shaheen Shah & Mariam Shah

A triptych of installation images from The Suitcase exhibition. Photograph credit: James Clark. — A triptych of installation images from *The* *Suitcase* exhibition. Photograph credit: James Clark.

An article about the exhibition, The Suitcase, at Wentworth Woodhouse, Rotherham, which brought together artists from the Zanib Collective, a group of artists, writers and oral historians comprised of women of Pakinstani origin.

The Zanib Collective are Shaheen Shah, a visual artist, Zanib Rasool MBE, a writer and poet, and Mariam Shah, an oral historian. Their first art exhibition, ‘The Suitcase’, was showcased at Wentworth Woodhouse capturing the sight, smell, and feel of the Pakistani home through stories, poetry, visual images and video. The suitcase represents the migrant diaspora, the journey from one place to another and for the first generation Pakistani women who came here in the 1960s; the suitcase carried visual memories through everyday objects the women brought with them from Pakistan such as the prayer mat, clay pots, bracelets and henna.

More information: https://wentworthwoodhouse.org.uk/news/asian-artists-take-over-the-chapel-at-wentworth-woodhouse/

To read the article in full, scroll the PDF below:

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Zanib Rasool

Zanib Rasool MBE has worked 30 years in the voluntary sector in Rotherham. Zanib is currently undertaking Doctoral in Education at the University of Sheffield. She was a community researcher on the Sheffield University collaborative project, 'The social, historical, cultural and democratic context of civic engagement: Imagining different communities and making them happen,' funded by ESR/AHRC Connected Communities programme. She is also co-editor of Re-Imagining Contested Communities (Connecting Rotherham through research) book to be published in 2017. She was a researcher on the ‘Threads of time’, a co-produced participatory arts project funded by AHRC’s Connected Communities Festival 2016, AHRC funded project called ‘Taking Yourselves Seriously: artistic approaches to social cohesion’ and exploring ways in which artistic methodologies can support community-led research with a focus on the life trajectories of women from Pakistani heritage backgrounds. Zanib has co-authored Re-imagining Contested Communities: Connecting Rotherham through research book that bring together academic and community voices. She has written for academic journals and contributed to book chapters

Zanib is a poet. A selection of her poems can be found on Artsteps website:

https://www.artsteps.com/view/5f156fa87383810c145ead07