Papaya Dreams
Farihah Aliyah Shah
Papaya Dreams
Farihah Aliyah Shah
Billboard Project
May to June, 2024
This series began with a comment by my mother about fruit (specifically the papaya) not tasting the same here in Canada as it did back home in Guyana. The work is an exploration of my diasporic identity which at times feels like a fever dream; one part rooted, while the other in nostalgia, memories, and inherited stories that I resonate with and yet can’t grasp their magnitude. Although the papaya doesn’t taste the same, eating it with my mother and other members of the community feels like a portal to “home”. In this tryptic, there is an image of the papaya in my grandmother’s house (now owned by my aunt) captured in my first visit to Victoria Village, Guyana alongside the fruit freshly cut open in my kitchen in Bradford, Ontario, and another of it held in my hand with the backdrop of our suburb. The fruit shifts geographically, its shape and form adapt and differs with every transition, the taste is altered, and yet the experience and tradition it holds remains.
Farihah Aliyah Shah is a contemporary lens-based artist originally from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (Treaty 6) now based in Bradford, Ontario, Canada (Treaty 18). She holds a BHRM from York University and a BFA in Photography with a minor in Integrated Media from OCAD University in Toronto, Ontario.
Using photography, video, sound, and installation, Shah’s research and lens-based practice explores identity formation through the colonial gaze, forced migration in relation to labour of goods and services, race, connectivity to land, and collective memory. She analyzes and critiques the photographic canon while building new narratives and archives that narrow gaps within her personal history addressing intersectionalities of her identity: multi-diasporic, female-identified, Black, Caribbean, etc.
Shah was the 2019 recipient of the John Hartman Award, long-listed in 2022 for the New Generation Photography Award, and the 2023 recipient of the CCI x WOPA Fellowship at the Perez Art Museum of Miami (PAMM). Shah is also the co-founding member of Mast Year Collective; an artist duo exploring kinship through collective practice. She has exhibited internationally in Asia, Europe, and North America.