Shilpo Shikka
Shilpo Shikka by Rahela Khan is her year-long practise-based PhD Art research project, presented as an exhibition at Gallery Frank, Ebor Studio, Littleborough from 16th July until 05th August 2022. The show encompasses a whole body of artwork, using art practice as PhD research. 

Created in response to her family’s oral and visual archives held intimately within her family’s memories and experiences.  

Shilpo Shikka translated to Art Education, is an intricate project, emphasising the visuals of Khan’s own family and other migrant communities within the northern regions of Greater Manchester and Lancashire. Khan utilises on her insider knowledge for communities of South Asian descent and predominantly practice the Islamic faith in the UK to depict an awareness of Islamic art. She looks at the use of textiles as a pastime before migrating from the Indian sub-continent to the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale to take up employment. From around the 1950's onwards the textile mills of the North offered less skill-dependent job opportunities for South Asian migrants at the time. Khan focuses on the stark differences of working with textiles in the UK, most working long hours from home and the cotton mills, isolated from their communities. 

She deals with her own lived experience of emotional intimacy and distance with her late parents, concepts such as social histories of folks in the northwest of England, having been marginalised and misrepresented. Khan focuses on how cultural memory is continued, investigating ideas around cultural and faith traditions, what ‘home’ means, otherness and belonging, property and migration. She interrogates the inclusion aspect for social cohesion, examining whether things have improved for her community within the UK art sector over the last few decades. She wishes to contest the British media’s misconceptions of marginalisation, subjugation and oppression.