{"id":4805,"date":"2026-01-05T15:43:40","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T15:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/?page_id=4805"},"modified":"2026-02-03T11:08:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T11:08:10","slug":"alia-syed-january-2026","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/alia-syed-january-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Alia Syed, January 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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What I am Reading Now\u2026
Alia Syed
<\/strong>January 2026<\/p><\/div>

\u00a0<\/div>

Whilst making The Ring in the Fish<\/em> I read books relating to material memory, including Annette Kuhn<\/strong>\u2019s Family Secrets<\/em><\/strong> and Remnants of Partition<\/em><\/strong> by Aanchal Malhotra<\/strong>; I needed to enter a space where I was open to other peoples\u2019 testimonies: these works charted a self-reflexive terrain;\u00a0 enabling me to articulate my own concerns more clearly, unpicking interrelations between official scripts and internal remembrance. In Seeing for Ourselves <\/em>Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan<\/strong>\u2019s heartfelt grappling with ethical conundrums of representation was indispensable. But I\u2019ve chosen to start with Ordinary Notes<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0by Christina Sharpe<\/strong> a book I read after my exhibition was prematurely closed due to CCA management\u2019s inability to adequately respond to the surge of feeling surrounding the genocide in Gaza and signing PACBI (The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel). I found her attention to form exciting and the depth of feeling in a time of both political and personal turmoil instructive.<\/p>

Last night I went back to the beginning. It was as if the pages of the book were falling, transmuted into concrete evidence that I no longer wanted to sift through.\u00a0<\/p>

Note 2 Verb: to notice or observe with care; to notice, observe, and related senses.<\/em><\/p>

I recognise the feeling: an action that is continuous in every note. A doing that is always present or lingers under the surface before it kicks in.<\/p>

Ordinary Notes<\/em> is a beautiful book, but it\u2019s also a book about terror \u2013 racial trauma, how white supremacy infiltrates every aspect of American life.<\/p>

A book of encounters where each encounter is allowed to reverberate \u2013 denied the escape of narrative flow we sit with each moment, paragraphs, single sentences occupy: bounded by space.<\/p>

Sharpe translates one form into another, each object she encounters hewn into a memorialisation the experience of which often leaves one stranded \u2013 the edge of the next page \u2013 she pulls us up. Her book becomes a cartography of living, tracing how history continually impinges on the present.<\/p>

Structures of violence bare down, she tunnels out, deftly swerves into a clearing to catch her breath.<\/p>

Time folds back, gaping, Charlottesville Virginia 2017, US Capital building 2021, the Bell Hotel, Essex 2025, a continuous action. Glasgow, 20th September 2025 a man has adapted the Union Jack into bat wings \u201cI was never brought up to be a racist person but \u2013\u201d<\/p>

Barely gaining traction with the wind, Saltire crumpled across her shoulder \u2019Clean out the illegals.\u2019<\/p>

Dawn: verb is action, the action that is ever present. Beautiful in her pleated skirt pinched in at the waist; she holds herself against the flow, cradling her book; perhaps it\u2019s the knuckles wound slightly too tight round the edges that gives us a clue; a delicate frame with a dimple in her chin, Elizabeth Eckford \u2013 braced. Behind her, the same grimace which met her, now outside the Bell Hotel. Sara Ahmed<\/strong> plays it differently in The Cultural Politics of Emotion<\/em><\/strong> but it\u2019s the same action, economies of affect like the plasma from the screen \u2013 it\u2019s all connected.\u00a0<\/p>

Seeing for Ourselves And Even Stranger Possibilities<\/em><\/strong> by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan<\/strong> starts with the simple desire to extract herself from the gazes that constrain her; she interrogates her impetus to write – her excessive archiving, untangling the systematic purging of the atrocities of empire in relation to her own and her Grandparents\u2019 inability to remember the simplest of events. \u2018Operation Legacy\u2019 was a policy implemented whilst former colonies became independent; documents that were deemed too sensitive for the newly emerging post-colonial states were burned, redacted, some sunk in the middle of the ocean \u2013 her archiving becomes a ‘fortress in the face of erased erasure.’<\/p>

In her choice of examples of how imperial ideologies invade not only land, but mind and body, Manzoor-Khan highlights a moment when an Indigenous woman from Greenland recalls her thirteen year-old self being taken out of class, told to remove her underpants by a doctor, who then \u2018forced an IUD contraceptive device into her child sized uterus\u2019.\u00a0<\/p>

Memory, or the lack of it, underpins most of the book, it is Manzoor-Khan\u2019s material which she wields sometimes as a weapon and sometimes as a balm; recounting a trip she took to her Grandmother\u2019s township in Pakistan; her Nani\u2019s footsteps activate a map of familial relations; to counter Google Maps\u2019 ignorance of the locality, Manzoor-Khan renames houses and streets \u2018the house of the cousin with three ducks [\u2026] Uncle dispute land.\u2019<\/p>

It is Manzoor-Khan\u2019s sensorium that weaves all these disparate elements together; a Chocolate Flake Soft Scoop ice cream melts too quickly while she reinterprets Plato\u2019s Cave, and al-Ghazali’s commentary before forming her own interpretation.<\/p>

Intimate portraits and interactions with her loved one\u2019s counter outside forces that pierce the everyday domestic sphere, in the chapter \u2018Grief is a type\u00a0of Ghaib\/love is a type of sight\u2019 Manzoor-Khan quotes an ayah from the Quran where spouses are referred to as garments for each other.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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This ayah is one of the ways Islamic theology elaborates on love as something that ‘holds you and protects your nakedness’.<\/span><\/div>
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\u0644 \u0628 \u0633 (laam Ba Seen) – ‘root letters linking to concepts of clothing’ (libaas), enveloping, surrounding, and accompanying: a constant between our inner vulnerability and the outer world of appearances; in many ways her book is also a garment, informing a journey to understanding both the complexity of Islamic thought and how Islamophobia is choking not only those within, but also those seeking refuge on, our shores.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Alia Syed<\/strong><\/a> was born in Swansea, and lives between London and Glasgow. She has been making experimental films in Britain for over 30 years. Her work has been shown extensively in cinemas and galleries around the world. Syed\u2019s work interrogates the protean nature of self-narration: enfolding fact, fiction, present and past; how histories are made and unmade. Forthcoming presentations for 2026 include Courtisane Film festival and a retrospective at Punto de Vista in Spain. In 2018 she exhibited in Delirium Equilibrium<\/em> at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, 2019, Artist in Focus<\/em> at Courtisane Film festival in Belgium. Her film Meta Incognita<\/em> was shown at the Yale centre of British as part of ArtMigrating Worlds: The Art of the Moving Image in Britain<\/em> and (Im)materialworlds Tracing creative practice, histories and environmental contexts in artists\u2019 moving image from Southeast Asia and UK<\/em> (2022). In 2023 her seminal work Fatima\u2019s Letter<\/em> (1992) was shown at the Whitechapel gallery as part of Life is more important than Art<\/em>. In 2025 her new body of work The Ring in the Fish<\/em> was shown at the Centre of Contemporary Arts in Glasgow.\u00a0<\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Reading<\/div>
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Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, <\/em>Annette Kuhn (Verso Books, 1995)<\/div>

Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided, <\/em>Aanchal Malhotra (Hurst, 2019)<\/div>

Seeing for Ourselves: And Even Stranger Possibilities, <\/em>Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (Hajar Press, 2023)<\/div>

Ordinary Notes<\/em>, Christina Sharpe (Daunt Books, 2023)<\/div>
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The Cultural Politics of Emotion, <\/em>Sara Ahmed (Edinburgh University Press and Routledge, 2004)
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Please note the views published in\u00a0What I am Reading Now…<\/i>\u00a0are personal reflections of the contributors.
These may not necessarily represent the views of the University of Dundee.<\/span><\/p>

\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>

Home<\/a><\/p>

Previous Issue: Viola\u00a0Ye\u015filta\u00e7<\/strong>, December 2025<\/span><\/a>
Next Issue: Ibrahim Nehme, February 2026<\/a><\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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about projects What I am Reading Now\u2026Alia SyedJanuary 2026 \u00a0 Whilst making The Ring in the Fish I read books relating to material memory, including Annette Kuhn\u2019s Family Secrets and Remnants of Partition by Aanchal Malhotra; I needed to enter a space where I was open to other peoples\u2019 testimonies: these works charted a self-reflexive …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":271,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4805","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4805"}],"version-history":[{"count":41,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4954,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4805\/revisions\/4954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/cooper-gallery-inbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}