Big Screen Southend

Big Screen Southend

Aqsa Arif, Poulomi Basu and CJ Clarke, Asuf Ishaq, Aziza Kadyri

27 September 2025 to 3 January 2026

To coincide with Poulomi Basu’s solo exhibition Always Coming Home, Focal Point Gallery presents a programme of artist moving image on the Big Screen Southend. Featuring works by Aqsa Arif, Asuf Ishaq, and Aziza Kadyri, alongside a collaborative film by Basu and CJ Clarke, the programme brings together works that engage with questions of transnational identity, displacement, and resistance.

Screened daily on rotation on the Big Screen Southend from 27 September 2025 to 3 January 2026, 11am to 5pm.

Films in order of appearance:

Aqsa Arif, Spicy Pink Tea, 2023, film, 12:25 mins. Courtesy the artist.

Spicy Pink Tea is a film exploring cultural dissonance and assimilation through the story of a young Pakistani girl who, under the gaze of British paintings in a stately home, dreams of becoming the perfect upper-class lady. Inspired by the Arif’s own experience of dual heritage and displacement, the work reflects on identity, belonging, and the lingering weight of colonial grandeur.

Poulomi Basu and CJ Clarke, Fireflies, 2022, single channel film of a two-channel installation, 15:03 mins. Courtesy the artists.

Fireflies, created by Poulomi Basu in collaboration with CJ Clarke, is an experimental short that draws on feminist science fiction and auto-fiction to tell the story of a female astronaut who lands on a hostile planet. In this liminal space, time collapses and she is forced to conform memories of violence, confinement and transcendence.

Originally conceived as a two-channel installation, the film merges narrative with performance – to the right, a female body moves and performs in an undefined space, and to the left, archival material and black-and-white 16mm footage. The two screens are presented in conversation, creating a multiverse and resisting boundaries and linear time. Basu’s own matrilineal heritage informs the work and speaks of violence against womxns’ bodies. By embedding her body in both landscapes, Basu positions survival and care as acts of resistance, while also highlighting connections between ecological fragility, patriarchal violence, and capitalist exploitation. It offers a vision of resilience and world-building beyond the status quo.

Asuf Ishaq, Mother, 2020, HD film, 16:00 mins. Courtesy the artist.

In the film essay Mother, Ishaq aims to reclaim and uncover histories and memories of migration and displacement through a conversation with his mother over a fifty-year-old photograph. This image depicts Ishaq’s mother and aunt, taken by his uncle on the room of his mother’s new home in Jhelum, Pakistan, and it belongs to the family’s personal archive – it is an object that carries its own story.

Ishaq attempts to repair the photograph digitally alongside his mother, who recounts and retells histories of this house where they lived for number of years before joining her husband in England. This gesture, central to the work, performs both a physical and metaphorical repair, and hints at the fragmented nature of history. This film is a tribute to his mother’s courage and sacrifice, and a woman’s role in the migration journey.

Aziza Kadyri, Kadyrova Street, 2020, 05:25 mins. Courtesy the artist.

Kadyrova Street is a poetic solo video work created during the UK lockdown after Kadyri’s one-woman show Fittings was cancelled. Conceived as both an echo and an expansion of that live piece, it traces personal and family histories to explore post-Soviet Uzbek identity.

Through playful storytelling, shifting sets and hyperbolised memories of Moscow and Tashkent, it pieces together a migrant’s inner map while examining the stereotypes faced daily by young Central Asian migrants and questioning fixed ideas of culture, home and self.

About the artists:

Aqsa Arif is a Scottish-Pakistani interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Glasgow. Her work explores hybrid identity, displacement, and cultural dissonance through speculative fiction, weaving folklore, mythology, and cinematic language. Drawing from her dual heritage and lived experience, she reclaims and reimagines both pre- and postcolonial worlds.

Arif was nominated for the major national touring exhibition Jerwood Survey III (2023-2024), launching at Southwark Park Galleries in London and touring Cardiff, Sheffield, and Edinburgh. She was awarded the 20/20 residency by UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute, hosted at Kelvingrove, culminating in 20 new permanent acquisitions within UK public art collections. In 2023, Arif received the Platform: Early Career Artist Award and the RSA Morton Award. Arif’s short film, Spicy Pink Tea, won Best Dance Film at Aesthetica Film Festival and earned a nomination for the Young Scottish Filmmaker Prize at GSFF 2023. She has been selected for residencies at Hospitalfield, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh Printmakers, The Hugo Burge Foundation and Cove Park. She was the recipient of the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Research residency at the British School at Rome.

Poulomi Basu is a BAFTA Breakthrough UK 2024 recipient and was awarded the 2023 ICP Museum Infinity Award for outstanding contribution to Contemporary Photography and New Media. Her work Maya: The Birth Of A Superhero was nominated in competition at Festival de Cannes 2024. Basu was awarded the Hood Medal by the Royal Photographic Society for the work Blood Speaks which resulted in a major policy change. Her work is held in the collections of Victoria & Albert Museum (UK), Museum of Modern Art Library – Special Collections (USA), Harvard Art Museums (USA), Autograph ABP (UK), Martin Parr Foundation (UK), Rencontres d’Arles (France), Olympic Museum (Switzerland), Lightwork (USA).

CJ Clarke is an award-winning director, writer, author and producer. Crossing between narrative and experimental film, XR and installation, his work explores themes and stories at the intersection youth, identity and class. He often collaborates with other artists to enable and activate historically marginalised and socially engaged narratives.
His work is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Arts (USA), Harvard Art Museums (USA), and Victoria & Albert Museums (UK).

Asuf Ishaq’s practice predominantly examines the post-colonial body as an archive and historical geographical places as sites of cultural and political meaning. Ishaq is interested in themes of migration, embodiment, fragmentation, displacement, and memory. By unravelling narratives and archives, he reveals new meanings and draws out personal histories. Ishaq works with narrative, language, sonic, film, still images, and archival material, which manifest as moving image, sonic, sculptures and installation.

Ishaq grew up in Birmingham and now works between Birmingham and London. Ishaq studied MFA Fine Art 2020 at Goldsmiths College of Art. His recent exhibitions, residencies and awards include: Group exhibition New Art exchange (2025), New Contemporaries Studio Residency at Hospitalfield, Axis Fellowship (2024), Solo exhibition Articles of Home, Reid Gallery, GSA exhibitions, Glasgow, group exhibitions You are a Memory I am your Shadow, Reid Gallery (2023),  Not to be a Singular Being, Chisenhale Art Place Studio, London, The London Open (2022), Whitechapel Gallery, London, Solo presentation for Image Behaviour, (ICA) London, Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London (2022), Groundings Film Screening, Goldsmiths CCA, London and Inside the Country of the Skin, Stryx Gallery, Birmingham (solo) (2021).

Aziza Kadyri is a London-based Uzbek interdisciplinary artist working with textiles, installation, performance, and creative technology, and the co-founder of Qizlar, a collective of artists and activists from Uzbekistan and its diaspora. Her practice explores how handcraft, Central Asian identities, and global digital cultures intersect, using textiles and interactive installations to tell speculative stories, preserve memory, and resist erasure – contributing to wider conversations on decolonial aesthetics and feminist tech. Kadyri represented Uzbekistan alongside Qizlar Collective at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Presently, she is a Creative Technologies Fellow at Somerset House Studios in collaboration with the UAL Creative Computing Institute.