My Father's Imagination II

After the outlawing of Communism in the 1950s in Pakistan, artist Eshan Rafi’s father joined an underground Communist group there. As a young man in the 1970s, he was dedicated to revolutionary politics and the potential of a more equitable way of living. From his teens until he was married in his early thirties, Eshan’s father operated illegally-owned printing presses and was known for being a strategist and a writer whose work mobilized people.

My Father’s Imagination II is a performance that reinscribes the political life of Eshan’s father into the present day. With image-based ephemera connected to their father’s past including posters, along with contemporary photographs taken by the artist on a recent trip to Lahore, Eshan methodologically speaks back to the images, expanding beyond the images’ place in history, and setting them within the context of their own body here in so-called Toronto, Canada. Eshan asks: What might it mean to be both politically dissident and a political descendant? How might the body be host to these questions? Could one begin to find answers through movement? How might an inherited, still image be metabolized through the moving body? 

This line of inquiry is driven by Eshan’s dance practice and activates a psychic mode of problem-solving guided by a state of feeling that is prompted by the imagery they, as performer, interact with. These states are simultaneously processed by the mind-body through a kind of environmental and temporal transpositioning. In My Father’s Imagination II, Eshan assumes the position of medium, with these familial-historical images becoming sites of psychic excavation and their performance a sense- and place-making exercise for future generations.

My Father’s Imagination was initially performed in Chicago at Roman Susan in May 2025.