Rahila Haque is a curator and researcher based in London. Her research is concerned with the presence and development of black and anti-imperial feminist epistemologies across intergenerational artistic practices in the UK, and considers interdisciplinary methodologies in generating modes of feminist visual and critical enquiry that draw on the embodied, speculative and relational.
She is currently PhD candidate at the centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. She is co-author, with Sayantan Maitra Boka, of a forthcoming publication on the work of the Dhaka-based artist-led initiative Britto Arts Trust to be launched at Documenta 15. She was previously Residencies Curator at Camden Art Centre and Assistant Curator of the 58th Venice Biennale exhibition May You Live in Interesting Times. Between 2009-15 she was Curatorial Assistant and Assistant Curator at the Hayward Gallery, organising major exhibitions by Dayanita Singh, Jeremy Deller and Ernesto Neto and co-curating the Hayward Project Space exhibitions Jananne Al-Ani: Excavations; What’s Love Got to Do with It; and Dineo Seshee Bopape: slow-co-ruption. She was awarded a Gasworks/Triangle Network Fellowship in 2018 and holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Her Archipelagos in Reverse project considers artists’ writing and publishing as locations of black and anti-imperial feminist knowledges. It considers how these knowledges were animated in Black and Asian women’s artistic production and discourse in the 1980s, and their connections to feminist modes of practice in the work of contemporary diaspora artists. Her research looks at the textual and conceptual spaces created by artists in the face of institutional exclusion and misrecognition and as acts of joy, solidarity and self-generated discourse. She is interested in how methods of storying resonate with and potentially redetermine diasporic feminist artistic praxes.