In The Studio: Anika Ahuja

Anika Ahuja (b. Montréal, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow. Working across, installation, drawing, and film, her work tackles themes of intimacy, belonging, social structures, and yearning. In the last year, Ahuja’s practice has ventured more into filmmaking through an installation lens. She has recently completed an MSc in Experimental Filmmaking at The University of Glasgow, culminating in ‘HEAVY FOOTED’, a multi-screen film recently exhibited as part of her Master’s dissertation at Broadside, in Glasgow’s Southside.

Your work has changed quite a bit in the last year or two. Can you talk to me about that change and what sparked it?

I wouldn’t say that it’s changed so much as I’m just constantly dipping in and out of everything. I’m at this point in my career where I want to give things a go and it doesn’t matter if I’m comfortable with it. I’ll fuck around with it. For example, when I was at Hospitalfield last summer, I was obviously going to take an opportunity to muck around with this 19th century harp because when else will I get the opportunity to do that? And then of course this past year I decided to do an MSc in experimental filmmaking at Glasgow Uni. That’s allowed me to really focus on the filmmaking, moving image aspect. But historically, I did my undergrad in drawing and painting and then after I graduated, I only made installation work. Then I made a drawing for the first time in 10 years the year before last and now I’m playing with film.

How do you compartmentalise all of these different mediums in your head? 

I think they’re one part of a big whole. The thing that I’m drawn to just in terms of all of these different mediums are symbols and objects. I’m really interested in the way objects can have multiple readings and change from context to context. Generally speaking, if I’m working with installation, I’m really considering the materials I’m using and the significance that they hold and how that changes based on  their relation to one another. I’m just interested in this inherent language that exists across materials and trying to use that meaning to construct a narrative, or a consideration, or to inquire about something without it being overly explicit. My brain is always trying to figure out how to appropriately express the thing that I’m thinking about and that changes my approach. One medium sometimes is just more effective. I’ll switch around based on what I’m thinking about.

How have you found being back in an academic program? You’re working on something quite different from what you studied in undergrad and in the Masters you embarked on previously.

This was probably the most positive academic experience I’ve had. Prior to this, I was working on an MFA in 2019 at the Glasgow School of Art. That was post-second fire, pre-pandemic, during a bunch of strikes. Honestly, that was a pretty horrible experience. For me, it was the right decision to not finish the program and I’m really glad I got to have really fulfilling experiences between then and now. But the reason I decided to do the MSc was because I had made one film that I had started working on in my MFA and it was an incredibly simple thing, 6 minutes of a single shot. I was wanting to push myself and play with a new medium and I’m at the stage where I’m ok if something doesn’t work. I’m not really worried about having all of the experience or looking really sleek or making a perfect product because I’m just trying to figure it out as I go. I applied on a whim and was accepted. The cohort for the most part are people who have worked in film, tv, and radio, so it was interesting being the only one who came from this art school background. I think a lot of people took a more traditional, narrative or documentary approach to their work, and I had always only ever thought about film for myself in an installation context. It just sort of naturally evolved. 

I’d been photographing windows for years and years. Maybe I have a peeping tom streak in me… Kidding. I think there’s something really funny about a city like Glasgow. And actually my friend, Sasha said this too, when he was living in the UK, he was like, the thing that people always say about Glasgow is that no one uses their curtains. And it’s so true. I used to just walk around at night and you can see into people’s homes and there’s something really romantic but also bittersweet about it. I think a lot of people can relate to this experience of longing, for some idea of a life, a world, or an experience that isn’t theirs. I think we get a lot of this from social media now, the way that people are always presenting their lives. We have these associations about what success, or joy, or privilege, or comfort look like, and I think that’s a really, really visceral feeling. I’ve experienced that a lot looking into people’s windows. You end up projecting your whole internal landscape of fear and expectation onto something you know nothing about. I think that that’s sort of where this work came from. 

This line of inquiry started during the pandemic, just because the only thing we could do was walk around. There was nothing going on. My ex and I would go on really long walks and just stare into win…oh well I would stare into windows. I think it’s just been sort of a slow roll of those themes that have come to me and then a lot of the other symbolism just came about from being like, what is an interesting image that I’d want to make, considering constructing cinematic images for the first time. I used to do a lot of photography when I was younger, prior to my 20s, and so maybe there’s a little bit of that muscle memory coming back. At the same time, it’s a really new visual language for me and I still don’t know how confident I am about constructing that imagery, but it was a lot of fun to push that boundary and I’m excited to see what might come out of that type of image making in the future. But there’s definitely some moments in these films that I feel really good about. Some nice stills. 

What moments in particular?

Obviously the dancing scene. I filmed that in the pub The Duke in Dennistoun. Originally I shot it twice at The Quaich in Shawlands. Checkered floors is a common pattern in pubs in Glasgow and I was naturally really drawn to it. The film deals with racehorses and both times I shot, there were horse races playing on the tvs. But also both times, I was approached by an old punter who was like ‘do you  know about the history of this floor?’ and we’d end up just chatting about the space. I obviously enjoy the aesthetic and was drawn to the floor but now I think I’m attached to that scene because of the experiences I had around it. Ultimately I went with the recording at The Duke because I wasn’t happy with the way the footage turned out at The Quaich. The Duke is close to my house, it has a really nice floor, and there’s a bit more space. I love that shot so much because if you listen closely, you can hear the dinging of the lottery machine, which reflects this idea of betting in the film. I love the parts where you can see the sticky splatterings of liquid on the floor.

I chose the song ‘Baby’ by the Emerson Brothers because I love it. I think a lot of people do. This was a film that sort of initially spouted from a really personal experience involving heartbreak and longing. It was a song that I listened to a lot when I was in this specific situation. So it just felt like, okay, this is the little personal aspect that I can pop into here. I wasn’t sure if I was going to use a cover, the original recording, or sing it myself, but my friend Daniel suggested that he and our friend Oscar do it. Oscar sent me the recording and it is so beautiful. I’m kind of bummed that I didn’t get to use the whole thing because let me tell you, Oscar pulled some notes at the end of that recording and it’s really, really, really special. Hopefully he’ll put that out there sometime for you guys to listen to.

Daniel is the hand that’s stroking the horse and there’s this moment when the frame fills up with the horse’s fur and it’s just this rich textural surface and that feeds back into this natural attraction I have to materiality. But also working with the horses was so wonderful because of this woman Jill who was working at Busby Equitation Centre where I was shooting, and just getting to know the animals and being on the yard with so many young people who were riding horses. For me, maybe those moments stand out because I think they’re visually enticing but my ability to build an enticing image also came from my level of engagement with the space. 

I grew up down the street from an equestrian centre and I had two neighbours who collectively had six horses…

Horse girl.

Horse girl! I was a horse girl. There’s one photo of me with a pony when I was a kid, you know those state fairs where you get to ride a pony, but I’d never really interacted with horses prior to growing up in the house and neighbourhood that I did. My parents bought a plot of land in Upper Marlboro, Maryland and built our family home on it. They’d bought what was horse grazing land from the couple who resided on the property behind the plot. As I was older, maybe middle or high school, and becoming more familiar with these horses, making friends with the neighbours and getting to feed them, brush them, and ride them every once in a while, it made me realise how fragile and delicate they are as creatures. I went to Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, which has a big equestrian program, and all of this made me realise I have this really strong affinity for ‘the horse’. We talked about this yesterday, how the horse, as a motif and symbol, is quite popular right now so I’d like to talk to you a bit about that recurring motif, in conjunction with these images of the shining of the shoe and the footwork in the pub.

It’s the year of the Fire Horse too. I actually have a friend, Dylan Pailes-Friedman, who just put out an amazing film Someone to Steal Horses With, and he and I were talking about this years ago. And then obviously Lisette May Monroe just had that gorgeous show at Gulabi Gallery for Glasgow International that had the horse and the curtains. And I went to go see it and I was like, ‘oh no Lis why do we have the exact same themes in our work!’

I’m trying to think of why I was drawn to the horse. I know that initially Dylan and I were thinking of making a project together that would have a horse component and unfortunately that didn’t happen due to lack of funding and space. And then he went on to make his film. Initially I didn’t know if I was going to work with horses or not, but it just happened. The horse is definitely in the collective conscience at the moment. There’s this instagrammer called @saltlacroix and she is so good. She engages in satirical socio-political critique and she’s talking a lot about this ‘beige moment’ in western, pop culture. She’s based in the States. She’s referring to the specific americana-isms related to the MAGA movement. A return to tradition, the ranch, homesteading. Which is really interesting because there’s a lot of horses in these photoshoots and advertisements. The whole cowboy thing is super popular right now. And admittedly, I was always very interested in westerns. They’ve always been my favorite genre of film and specifically, the Mormon settlement of the west and the violence around that and the layers of these communities that were coming in and taking over the land, who learned horses from indigenous people, exploited the indigenous people and turned these horses into working animals. Horses are generally presented with so much dignity and care and they’re such a majestic animal as you’ve mentioned, but they’re also really exploited and they continue to be exploited and treated as objects.

There used to be a hippodrome in Montréal where I’m from that shut down years ago. I hadn’t thought of racehorses beyond cinema, like the film Seabiscuit, until I moved to the UK because betting culture and horse racing is such a big thing here. I found that there’s this really interesting contradiction that happens where horse racing and horse riding and other horse sports like polo. They’re thought of as such posh endeavors, but at the same time, the people engaging in a lot of the gambling are from more working class communities. Even the spectacle of going to the races, you think about ASCOT or the imagery of the Kentucky Derby, where everyone is in these big ‘ol hats and seersucker suits, and it feels like a further progression of this colonial relationship to horses. I was thinking about the horse in that respect. The horse is treated with so much dignity, but it’s also got this life cycle to it.

I remember being a kid and my first recollection of seeing a horse in cinema was in this film where there was a sand storm and a guy is riding his horse through this storm, the horse falls, injures its leg, and the guy very dramatically stabs the horse to kill it. As a kid, I couldn’t have been older than ten, I remember being confused and not really understanding why this horse had to be killed for such, what I would’ve thought, was a minor injury. Not understanding how detrimental of an injury that is, especially for a ‘working’ or ‘performance’ animal.

I think that’s such a collective experience. I think every child in the West has been traumatised by a film where someone’s like, “I’m sorry”, and shoots their horse in the head because it breaks a leg or something.

As you were saying all this I was also thinking of the relation of the horse to moving image. The first film ever made was of a horse running [The Horse in Motion, 1878]. Maybe in the back of my mind, there was something going on there subconsciously.

How did the scenes of the horse and the polishing of the shoes relate to each other? Specifically tied to these themes of longing and heartbreak. 

With the theme of longing, that goes back to the idea of longing to be with someone, or longing for a relationship that you might be fantasising about, or you might be grieving, and relating that to this grander scheme of longing for a type of life. Generationally, we’ve been presented with this idea that if you work hard enough, you’ll be able to have all of the things that you want. Obviously we are looking at a really difficult time economically, environmentally, the cost of living crisis, the housing crisis, and this massive increase in conservatism and surge of racism and anti-immigration rhetoric which you and I have discussed. And I think both of us as immigrants to the UK, racialised immigrants to the UK, from North America; it’s this really interesting overlap of identities. I was thinking of this idea of climbing the ladder, success within a capitalist structure and how that is not really possible.

In some sort of way, I was thinking about the expectations of assimilation or being the “good immigrant”. This work really came from heartbreak but somehow it turned into something much bigger than that. Fundamentally it’s this concept of wanting to be good enough or making yourself good enough so that you can receive all of the gifts you’ve worked hard enough to “deserve”. That’s what the polishing of the shoe represents to me. It’s this continued labour, that if you do the right thing and keep up appearances and tick all of the boxes of propriety and hard work, you can have the things that you want. But that’s more of an endless loop than a ladder. The idea is that labour would ideally facilitate pleasure, leisure, or access. In a sense, being able to indulge in the idea of betting on horses or owning a horse, is a representation of that leisure. But at the same time, the horse is a subject of the labour that facilitates the leisure. The imagery of the horse and the labour of the person polishing the shoes end up being mirrors of each other. When the person with the shoes is dancing, it continues to be cut back to scenes of the shoe polishing. Even within those moments of attained leisure, you’re reflecting back on the amount of labour you will need to continue to uphold to even have access to it in the first place. 

I’m trying to present that idea as a bit of an illusion which is why the labour is presented on a solid screen format whereas the fantasy of the winning horse is projected onto a curtain. It makes it a bit more illegible depending on what time of day you’re seeing the work. But it parallels the idea of looking into someone’s window and imagining something better.

Could you explain the repeated places, names, and times said in the film depicting the shining of the shoe?

It’s the names of the three fastest racehorses ever recorded and their speeds. As someone who knows nothing about horses for the record – I just want to put my hand up, I think there’s a really strong emotionality around horses. I never thought horses would ever take up this much space in conversation for me!! Little Anika wishes! I went to horse camp for one week because I begged my parents.

Anyway, the second names listed are the top ten horse races globally. That listing is reflective of holding a certain standard. 

This work is personal in the sense that I guess I’m the horse. Beyond the sociopolitical elements expressed through the horse, and class, and pubs, the white hand in one film and the brown hand in the other performing labour; it really is about desirability and wanting to be desirable enough. And you and I have talked about this a lot.

Oh my God, we have.

When you place this idea of desirability into conversation around a racialised person or an immigrant, and we’re talking about right now; the status of immigrants in the UK, across the west. People that aren’t even immigrants but have a darker skin tone, etc. are also subject to this imposed undesirability that is presented through the false idea of British or Scottish nationalism. In trying to fit, you’re attempting to increase this desirability, not necessarily in a romantic sense, but in terms of your desirability in a job or social setting. Your right to occupy space. It’s hard to articulate. It feels like a much more complicated thing, but that sense of wanting to be wanted, acceptable, desirable, considered, involved, is such a universal experience of longing that anyone in the world who’s ever wanted to be chosen or loved has experienced. When you place that within the context of race and migration, it becomes very different and complicated. I said I wouldn’t keep making work about race but it somehow feels impossible not to. 

It is impossible. It is hard to articulate. I’ve always had a very diverse group of friends and grew up in a very diverse area, living in Baltimore as an adult surrounded by people who look like me, have the same hair as me. I’ve always been someone who’s thought about my race because it’s impossible not to. It’s who I am and the first thing people see is that I’m a black woman, but I have had to think about my race and the role that that plays in every single relationship that I have, platonic or romantic, more now than I’ve ever had to in my entire life in a way that is, frankly, unbearable sometimes and really jarring. It is impossible to factor that out of any work or conversation that I do or have because it is an inherent part of the way that I exist. I have had people say really fucking crazy things to me and when your experience of a place is shaped by that, I dont think it can be taken out of the work. Especially when we are talking about a work that is personal and touching on quite vulnerable topics. I don’t know. I’ll never stop talking about it. It’s a very huge part of our social life.

Also right now, given the political climate, it’s absolutely impossible to not recognise conversations about immigration and racialisation. I’m a Canadian of Indian origin whose parents were born in India, thus coming from two former British colonies. The impact of that colonisation is still very tangible in both of those spaces. In some ways, it’s inevitable that when I’m in the UK, these themes are going to come up because I’m in the belly of the beast. In terms of that conversation, we’re kind of at the height of it. The work I make doesn’t necessarily aesthetically tie to my cultural heritage, it does in that I was raised in Canada and grew up with Western aesthetics so those are the aesthetics I feel most engaged with in terms of using them to dialogue with, but I wish I could just make a thing that wasn’t so socially charged. The only thing that is influencing this conversation so that we can talk about this film is that we don’t see people in the film. We see feet and legs and hands. And the hands that are performing the labour are brown and the hand stroking the horse is white. The second there is any of that contrast, you need to address the disparity. People still get upset about interracial couples in advertisements and stuff…

And I’m doing my best to stop the stigma!! I think there’s so much to pull from with these specific themes. I remember seeing a video recently that was like, ‘it’s not beating a dead horse because the horse is still doing stuff. We haven’t killed it yet.’

I was thinking about that yesterday where I was like, there are so many horse metaphors, ‘beating a dead horse’, ‘don’t put the cart before the horse’, or ‘horsing around’. I participate in all three of these activities. ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink’. Horses man. 

It’s such rich imagery, it’s such an interesting string of topics to pull from. On the back of GI, you mentioned Lis’s show earlier, there’s this pregnant horse that’s representative of a kind of potential. Or the horse in your film being representative of desirability, immigration, and racial tensions… I’m excited for all this horse content. What projects are you thinking of working on next?

Right now, I’m like, do I just commit to horse girl?! I think I’m done beating this horse for now. I have an idea for a moving image work I want to do in the winter back home in Montréal. I’m thinking about writing right now and thinking about the harp. I don’t really know what the next step is. I tend to do too much at the same time so we’ll see what emerges first, we’ll see what happens. I’m sad to be out of school because it was such a positive experience and I had such great tutors, and being forced to commit to something for such a long time was nice. It was nice to be focused on that.

It’s funny to make a film about longing and wanting to fit and then have it only really come to fruition because it’s been supported by so many wonderful people and wonderful friends. I definitely am really, really fortunate that I got to work with so many incredible people who are so supportive of this project. So yeah, maybe I just need to grow up.

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In the Studio is a monthly series interviewing Scotland-based artists and curators in their studios, conducted by Chaz Scott, a curator and art historian based between Baltimore, Maryland and Glasgow, Scotland.