She Forgets

2015 – 2016

She Forgets combines an archive of my grandmother’s life with personal reflection as I grapple with her forgetting. As my grandmother loses her memory to dementia, the repeated painful stories of her past begin to dissolve — her motherless girlhood, the isolation she felt after marriage living with my grandfather’s family in India while he worked in Hong Kong, the isolation that accompanied her when she joined him. When I witness this forgetting, I un-know the woman I knew. Layering old family photos, handwritten notes, my own analogue 6 x 9 inch photographs, and painting with healing turmeric paste (a remedy learned from my grandmother), I invite the viewer to follow my journey as I recover her stories, and forget them along with her.

Fatema Abdoolcarim, is a Hong Kong-born Indian-Pakistani photographer, video artist, and filmmaker. She graduated from University of Pennsylvania (2008) and California College of the Arts (2013), and is a recipient of the Murphy and Cadogan Award for Outstanding Emerging Bay Area Artist from The San Francisco Foundation (2012). Her photography has been exhibited in the United States, Hong Kong, Spain, and Denmark. Her short films have been screened at Locarno Film Festival, Sundance (Hong Kong), L’Alternativa Independent Film Festival (Barcelona), and Bogotà International Short Film Festival. Fatema is a member of the Copenhagen documentary art group, Ultramar Collective, and currently a doctoral student in Art History and Creative Writing at The University of Manchester.