New photography exhibition at Impressions Gallery explores a mother and daughter's journey to Lahore

“Wahid is an artist who uses photography to convey her identity as a British Pakistani Muslim through her deeply rooted family history and the integration of South Asian migrants with the UK,” says Impressions Gallery curator Raquel Villar-Pérez. “Her photographs explore womanhood, memory, migration and the notion of home and belonging. The exhibition in some ways reflects the story of many of the women who migrated to Bradford in the 1970s and 80s. We hope it will resonate with them and their families.”

The images are very evocative and quite moving, particularly those showing Wahid’s mother exploring her former family home. Being there in that space affected both mother and daughter quite profoundly – for Wahid there was a connection to the building and her maternal family whom she had never met, while for her mother it held memories of a different time and an alternative sense of herself. Villar-Pérez says that Wahid had devised the project with four ‘chapters’ in mind – the family album, the Partition of India, loss and identity.

“When I started thinking about how best to present those strands on the gallery walls, I noticed that there were many other sublayers within them,” says Villar-Pérez. “The idea of home stood out for me, conceptually and visually. Maryam dedicated a great deal of time documenting the place that once was home to Zaibunnisa in Lahore, so I thought it was important to foreground this as a symbol of a caring home that guarded who Zaibunnisa was. When she left for the UK, it all changed. What once was home is not home anymore, as it belongs to other people, extended family members, and you can feel that sense of ‘unbelonginess’ in the photographs that Maryam took of her mum in the house.”

Those images are very poignant; others are joyful and celebratory – there is a feeling of reconnection that comes through in the photographs and perhaps a laying to rest of something. “The past is what ignited this project – the will to know who Zaibunnisa was and all that surrounded her in Pakistan including that abstract notion of home,” says Villar-Pérez. “The investigation led to an unexpected yet enlightening outcome, and that is that home is in the present, but they needed to visit Zaibunnisa’s past to realise and make peace with it, while Maryam needed to visit Pakistan to connect to her maternal family’s past and feel complete with her own identity.”

These are very powerful, complicated emotions at play and accordingly there is a thoughtful, reflective quality to all the photographs. “One of the many interesting things in Zaibunnisa is how Maryam intelligently intertwines her mum’s story and her own,” says Villar-Pérez. “From Zaibunnisa’s perspective, memory, loss, displacement, identity and migration come about because of her arranged marriage and subsequent relocation to the UK. In a way, all these emotional states are the consequence of leaving her family behind. In Maryam’s case, all of them depart from a sense of longing; longing for the family she never met, the lifestyle she never had, and that stems from the memories passed down to her through the generations.”

As with all good art, the intensely specific and personal has the capacity to become universal and Villar-Pérez hopes that the exhibition will speak to audiences in many different ways and on several levels. “Maryam’s photographs are extremely poetic and contain many nuanced elements that allow for further interpretations and layers of understanding,” she says. “We hope that visitors to the exhibition will find something within it that moves them, something they can relate to, and hopefully, they will cherish it and talk about it in years to come.”

Zaibunnisa by Maryam Wahid is at the Impressions Gallery, Bradford until July 1. impressions-gallery.com