The beginning and end of Sofiyah Ruqayah

Sofiyah Ruqayah is an artist living and working on unceded Gadigal land. Ruqayah works across a range of mediums to engage with ideas of personal and collective entanglement. A reverence for the non-human world underpins her practice, as well as a curiosity for 'irrational' cultural practices such as fortune telling and dream interpretation. Recent work explored these practices using obsolete fisherman's weather instruments housing crystals that slowly mutate in relationship with their environment.

She recently completed a 12-month studio residency at Parramatta Artists’ Studios and presented her first solo exhibition at 4A Centre for Contemporary Art in 2020. Ruqayah has exhibited both locally and internationally, including group exhibitions at Lubov Gallery, New York; and Peacock Gallery and with Woven Kolektif at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney.

This conversation took place in February 2022 on the occasion of Sofiyah Ruqayah’s exhibition, Lesser palace.

Interview by Zoe Theodore, Co-Director, Firstdraft, 2022–23.

Sofiyah Ruqayah installing her exhibition, Lesser palace, Firstdraft, Sydney, 2022. Photo: Firstdraft

Zoe Theodore: Lesser palace has many lines of enquiry – the possibility of connection through geology, bodily encounters with other beings, mythology, communist theory and science fiction – all of which speak to different collective experiences. In the catalogue essay you note that the exhibition “imagines ways of being in the world that rely less on notions of discrete selfhood”. Can you talk about entangling your own experiences of individualism while pushing against grand narratives of collectivism?

Sofiyah Ruqayah: We all have our own experiences of moving toward or away from connection, and for me, part of navigating these experiences necessarily involves a questioning of where I begin and end, what or who I consist of, and how the impacts of mutuality and difference influence how I move through the world. Thinking about our bodily porosity, as well as our collective aqueous origins and obligations to each other, helps me negotiate these questions as they pertain to my relationship to a network, whether that network is a relationship, a community, an ecosystem or an economy.

Sofiyah Ruqayah, Gutted, 2021, digital collage print on satin, storm glass, dimensions variable, installation view (detail), Lesser palace, Firstdraft, Sydney, 2022. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

“Thinking about our bodily porosity, as well as our collective aqueous origins and obligations to each other, helps me negotiate these questions as they pertain to my relationship to a network, whether that network is a relationship, a community, an ecosystem or an economy.”

ZT: The exhibition namesake is taken from the pressure point located between your index finger and thumb, a location that stows anxieties pertaining to the heart, which became the point of departure for the exhibition. Can you discuss how ideas pertaining to intimacy and personal affinity informed the installation?

SR: Around the time I was working on this exhibition I was regularly receiving acupuncture as a treatment for stress, so I was thinking a lot about where emotions are stored in the body. I had also been reading about the hedgehog dilemma, which is a metaphor that uses an example of a group of hedgehogs huddling in the rain to describe the simultaneous desire for warmth and the threat of wounding inherent in intimacy. I was drawn to the relationships between these different forms of puncture – the spines of a hedgehog, the vulnerability required of humans attempting some type of closeness, and the restorative needle that locates and treats the associated anxieties in the body.

“I was thinking a lot about where emotions are stored in the body.”

ZT: In a recent interview you talked about the possibilities permitted when artists relinquish their desire to say something political through their work, especially in relation to identity. You also mentioned that you have been recently thinking about art in new ways, leaving behind those preoccupations that don’t serve you. How has this new found liberation manifested in the creation of Lesser palace?

SR: I didn’t think about why I was making the works in Lesser palace. I made them and they made me happy, or made me feel some other kind of emotion. I’m into the idea of not needing to be an expert, so I gave myself permission to play in Premiere Pro without knowing how to use it. The video work in Lesser palace was a way for me to be really bad at something, and for it to still carry a lot of meaning.

There’s a lot of pressure on artists to intellectualise their practices, which to me is both weird and joyless. While working on Lesser palace I was thinking a lot about the theme of The Fool, aka the court jester, sometimes the trickster – a cultural archetype that offers us reminders about where and how valuable messages are often found. It’s rarely from the king (who has accumulated power through domination or nepotism) that we encounter truths, and if it is, it should be met with hearty suspicion. The Fool has no power, and breaks through what is culturally rigid by being free of the burden of trying to protect their power. Embodying The Fool allows me to let go of the need to convince anyone that I know things, and instead step into a mode of making that is emotionally rigorous and fulfilling.

Sofiyah Ruqayah, Gutted, 2021, digital collage print on satin, storm glass, dimensions variable. Photo: Supplied. Courtesy the artist.

Sofiyah Ruqayah, Cascading Failures, 2020, gang hooks dimensions variable, installation view, Lesser palace, Firstdraft, Sydney, 2022. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

“While working on Lesser palace I was thinking a lot about the theme of The Fool, aka the court jester, sometimes the trickster – a cultural archetype that offers us reminders about where and how valuable messages are often found.”

Sofiyah Ruqayah, Bismillah, 2021, video still. Photo: Supplied. Courtesy the artist.

ZT: The soft sculptural elements in Lesser palace, entitled Gutted, take similar writhing forms to your watercolour works on paper, transporting them from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional. Can you talk about why you are compelled to return to these deep-water dwelling, eel-like figures and where this fascination began? Is there a particular lineage that you are drawing from?

SR: A lot of my early watercolour work explored my relationship to specific river systems. Originally I was interested in drawing connections between these rivers, their health, and their connections to my bloodline. Thinking through this viscerally, and employing processes of bleeding materials into each other, catalysed all subsequent years of research into relationships between our watery bodies and other bodies of water. As mentioned earlier, thinking through what bodies consist of, both materially and immaterially, is a key driver in how I approach ontology and entanglement in my practice. The abject and the uncanny definitely also have roles to play in my affinity with bodies that writhe, mutate and repel. I’m drawn to forms that leak and threaten and stir up a little discomfort. The lineage across art history and theory is immense, but Louise Bourgeois has been instrumental as a beacon for my practice.

Sofiyah Ruqayah, Self portraits as the river Citarum, and Chin up, installation view, Venn Zero One, curated by Johanna Bear, Down Under Space, 2018. Photo: Supplied. Courtesy the artist.

ZT: I am curious about obfuscation in your work – obfuscation from glass, reflection or assemblage. How has chaos or nonsense informed your practice? And what are these mutuating forms or your preoccupation with porosity telling us?

SR: I love all forms of magic, psychism and the ‘supernatural’. I believe there is a lot of value in systems of knowledge and knowledge-gleaning that sit outside of the rational. Obfuscation feels like a sleight-of-hand magician – the construction of illusions mutates our experience of perception, of the ‘sensible’. What we sense, what is ‘sensible’, and what is ‘nonsense’ then becomes a really interesting thing to explore. For me this is part of a broader commitment in my practice to uphold curiosity about what type of knowledge is deemed trustworthy, and by who. It’s also just really fun to see things one way in one moment and take a step in a different direction and see things in a different way.

Sofiyah Ruqayah, Gutted, 2021, digital collage print on satin, storm glass, dimensions variable, installation view, Lesser palace, Firstdraft, Sydney, 2022. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

ZT: Where to next? What projects and plans do you have for the immediate and longer future?

SR: The themes I worked through in Lesser palace have actually instigated a deepening of my practice through further study – I’m about to begin studying acupuncture. My practice so far has really been a process in trying to find orientation through our inextricable entanglement, and I’ve found resonance over the past few years with the meridian systems (network of pathways through which qi or animating spirit flows) in traditional Chinese medicine. It makes a lot of sense to me to undertake a shift in my practice from a visual economy into a therapeutic modality. It feels a lot more like stepping deeper into my practice than stepping away from it.

Sofiyah Ruqayah in her studio, Parramatta Artists’ Studios. Photo: Supplied. Courtesy the artist.

Sofiyah Ruqayah, Lesser palace, 2022, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

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