Published by SEVENSTORE
Author: Millie Throp
In the same breath, Alina Akbar is an artist, wordsmith, activist, and 4th-generation Pakistani daughter. In practice, her portfolio is diaristic, wrangling with parts of her identity and those of the abundant South Asian community she exists within.
Whilst her practice is perhaps best defined as personal storytelling, disruption is native territory. Due to the sparsity of Muslim women’s voices in the arts, she’s often the first to speak in the spaces she enters. Reaching 26, Akbar has already premiered her subcontinental filmmaking in museums, showcased a personal image archive in Paris, and amplified desegregated narratives across football and fashion.
Sartorially, the artist’s penchant for Italian sportswear has inspired campaigns with C.P. Company and Stone Island. Most recently, she featured in Amina Jeng’s Stone Island Denim Research campaign, “The North We Share,” as part of SEVENSTORE’s three-part project with the Manchester Fashion Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Despite the immensity of the work she has produced over the past few years, womanhood is an armour she had never prided so publicly—until her latest exhibit, Queen of the Night (Raat Ki Rani), which took place in Manchester over the weekend.
In highlighting her own expression of femininity, the artist offered deep reflection on an Asian girlhood characterised by late-night car conversations; a space Akbar posits women have reclaimed since “men run the streets”.
For her debut solo show, justly, the bilingualist found herself back home in Rochdale, taking over the area’s infamous 1955 Haji Cash & Carry warehouse into an immersive after‑dark world of photography, sculpture, sound and film, reminiscent of childhood in northwest neighbourhoods.
Meddling with paradoxy in a faux-nocturnal setting, Raati ki Rani, or Queen of the Night, traversed themes of horror through humour, superstition through lived reality, and subversion through heritage. Lit with 3 metre tall streetlamps, the night’s other totems listed XL vapes, rite-of-passage chicken shops, and Punjabi parandas braided with jump leads.
Between “kunafa cups and karak chai”, Akbar’s cabal felt empowered to unpick their thoughts behind the wheel of a Nissan Micra, which sat fittingly as the room’s centrepiece. Joshing with the uncanniness of Jinn folklore, uttered in after-dark warning by Muslim mothers in their formative years, the counsel would also turn to the troubles of being a girl, beneath a moon that raised them into women. Inside the blue vehicle, soft-tongued verses were uttered for our listenership, encouraging rapport to unfold in its seats, uncensored.
Parading side-eyed, in-humour for an audience uninitiated, elsewhere, we enjoyed familiar scenes of adolescence over cake rusk and tea. Bringing the metropolis indoors, Akbar noted the project was brought together by a vanguard of diasporic sisters, from its mosaic bubble wands to its anecdotal intimacy. Sharing not only her vernacular but a bond formed in gendered surroundings, under their curation, a subverted Islam was told in fresh authorship—embracing the idiosyncrasies of tradition, essential to the unfolding of their inner-city kinship.