Sell Out, A Series: 5 Questions with Aaniya Asrani
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Sell Out is a series by interdisciplinary artist Angela Fama (she/they), who co-creates conversations with individual artists across Vancouver. Questioning ideas of artistry, identity, “day jobs,” and how they intertwine, Fama settles in with each artist (at a local café of their choice) and asks the same series of questions. With one roll of medium format film, Fama captures portraits of the artist after their conversations.
Aaniya Asrani (she/her) is a designer, artist, and social practitioner from Bangalore, India. Follow her on Instagram or visit her website at http://www.aaniyaasrani.com.
Location: Livia
What do you make/create?
I make and create many things. I began my practice as a designer. I went to school in India and studied visual communication and was primarily making artist books and graphic novels. I’ve always loved illustration. I love exploring different mediums, bringing ideas to life, and relating them back to my own experience, or the experience of others. When I moved to the unceded territories of the Coast Salish xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations (Vancouver) six years ago, I grew into what I have come to know as being a community based artist. Now, a lot of what I do is create installations, immersive spaces, or the conditions for community to come together and have conversation. Ultimately, I’m a storyteller, so what I hope to make, or create, in the world are opportunities for reciprocity and relationship, for people to cross lines of difference, to understand one another; lend an ear to listen.
What do you do to support that?
I hustle. I’ve always been hustling, which is kind of unfortunate, but also a reality of living as a brown body in a capitalist system. After graduating from the MFA program at Emily Carr, I dove straight into teaching and would teach as sessional faculty there, which was great, but it wasn’t consistent, so that led me to look for other opportunities. I found a sort of magical opportunity in working for posAbilities, a non-profit that works with folks with developmental disabilities, where I work as a community engaged artist. In being employed by them, I’m also working with InWithForward, which is a social design studio, and Curiko, which is an experience platform all about moments of connection. It’s like living in three worlds at the same time, because my role is a bit shape shifting depending on the context of the work.
I also take part in artist residencies and continue my teaching practice. Running independent workshops has become a big part of what I do; forming connections with community centers and neighborhood houses where I’m invited to lead sessions with folks like recently arrived immigrants or students. Additionally, I low-key sell art prints of my drawings.
Describe something about how your art practice and your “day job” interact.
Because I have a few different mediums I work in – design for instance – I’m always designing things at work, whether it’s artifacts, print materials, or curriculum, whatever it may be… one day I could be illustrating icons that talk about recognition, another day a tarot card deck for reimagining the child welfare system. So there’s a bit of design, a bit of illustration, but mostly the intersection is with the community engaged art part. I help to run a prototype that InWithForward and Curiko are running called Neighbourhood Organizing, which is about delightfully subverting the social norms that keep us distant from one another. And so, a lot of that is curriculum design, figuring out recruitment strategies, designing books and other artifacts, outreach, or even just the day-to-day running of the cohort – my facilitation practice comes into that as well.
In my master’s thesis, I talked about Radical Care, and the ways in which we can care for strangers through clay-based workshops. An amazing thing about my work is I can pitch that to the team and say, “This is where I want to spend some of my time,” and have some support enabling me to do that. Bringing Radical Care workshops to my day job was really exciting, and I want to keep doing more of that.
What’s a challenge you’re facing, or have faced, in relation to this and/or what’s a benefit?
Time for sure. How do you make time to prioritize your practice, even though you are a body that is working 9-5? How do you prioritize your own goals in your practice and bring that to work? How do you situate a community-based practice within an organization? I’m really lucky because the organization I work for sees value in what I do, but I imagine that would be a challenge if they didn’t. I would be struggling to reconcile these two parts of myself. One of the challenges is making more space for that. Creating space to talk to strangers, share stories, give those perspectives a different form because that’s what I really love doing.
Within my community practice, there is a challenge in that I’m very much an outsider to this culture, and so I have all these existential questions: Who am I? How can I do this work ethically? What is my position as a settler on unceded lands trying to create community and build a sense of belonging? All of these heavy questions that I don’t necessarily have answers to. Also realizing I have internalized a lot of colonialism myself; it manifests in me sometimes as a sense of inferiority talking to strangers, or imposter syndrome when I’m facilitating sessions and I think: Do I even know what I’m talking about? And I’m like, “I think I do!”
There is an unpredictability in community practice, where you can create all the conditions and not really be able to predict an outcome – which is the magic of it as well, amazing things surprise you, all the time, but at the same time there’s no way you can tell someone for sure that this practice is going to function in a certain way.
Have you made, or created, anything that was inspired by something from your day job? Please describe.
A project that was directly influenced by my line of work was when Annie Canto and I did a project for No.3 Gallery called SPAM (Special Presentation Art Mail). We wanted to create a scavenger hunt where we would make puppets, animated little figurines, which would highlight some of the features of a neighborhood. We started with the spaces in-between her house and my house, and went to these different parks and other community spaces, and started to animate these little puppets that we made from materials that were either found in those spaces or were inspired by those spaces.
The part that my work really influenced was the way in which we shared it. I was exposed to My Maps on Google, VideoAsk, using QR codes – that kind of technology that I wouldn’t otherwise have been exposed to other than through my work, and I brought this to this practice and found that as an engaging way to share what we had made with the community.
My day job has inspired a different style of facilitation too, where I think about accessibility a lot more than before. For example, with the Radical Care workshops, I had to make sure that the space had multiple ways of engaging, so people could make something out of clay, people could also write something on the walls, or draw; there were opportunities to just have conversation, have some hot chocolate and hang out. Now I’m exposed to different ways of being in the world – people that may not be sighted, people that can’t hear, who might do things a bit differently. Something I think about a lot these days is: How do you create a space that invites everybody to share their experiences?
Angela Fama (she/they) is an artist, Death Conversation Game entrepreneur, photographer, musician, previous small-business server of many years (The Templeton, Slickity Jim’s etc.). They are a mixed European 2nd-generation settler currently working on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations.
Follow them at IG @angelafama IG @deathconversationgame or on their website www.angelafama.com
