Asad Chishti

Asad Chishti (they/them) is the @adjacent.furniture librarian, @bul-bul.press printer+publisher, and the @chairstablesorg media inventor. A first-generation Muslim immigrant, they have bicycled across Canada twice. For the past eight years they have been tinkering on research projects local and global around what it means to live a full life.

Themes of interest include but are not limited to: happiness, home, health, hiatus, histories, harvest, habits, _____, and H2O i.e. water. Formally trained as an engineering chemist and photojournalist, they have been taking a photo a day for over ten years, and are currently investigating how to better put ink to paper (in the shape of books).

Their work lives in private homes on bookshelves, and has been featured in various print, digital, and real-world spaces.

01. Asad Chishti + archival aerial images, Then and Now : Water and a Name (2020). Photo diptych.

02. Asad’s raft, displayed near the fire pit at the opening of Meeting by the currents

03. Three still frames from Charrettes in and

around the Water (2020). Video, 6:26.

04. Portrait of Asad at work by Erik Pinkerton

01

Asad Christie Artist Statement

Whitehorse is named such because of the White Horse rapids (which resembled the manes of a horse). One of the most precarious stretches of the river to cross, less than a decade after the city was incorporated the rapids were submerged under Schwatka Lake.

What does it mean:

To lose the place that names you? To have it transformed into something different.

To have that loss literally power you and your community? Water into electricity. For this to have been going on since 1958? 62 years. Does it give a place more or less of a right to call itself by the unnatural transformation of a place? An ode to what was.

Water holds a special place to all life. Hydrogen-bonding, the ability of ice to float on water, gives life time to survive through the winter, below the surface. In 2020, a year to be remembered for many glitches, warps, and bends on how we used to live, lessons on how to keep moving, the importance of what surrounds us where we are has never felt and been more important. My inquiry focused on the site of the former rapids, where the dam is now. Time was spent both on the river, around the river, pouring over historical aerial images, snapping a few, recording audio and then cooking it all digitally.