Shaheen Ahmed: Naz̤ar

“Naz̤ar” is a research project centered on South Asian Muslim communities across several European cities, rendered through interdisciplinary art practices. The project began in Athens, focusing on the neighborhoods around Omonia, Kypseli, and Attiki. This work navigates the shifting terrain of “visibility” within migrant realities. Through stories, rituals, and everyday gestures – where visibility can mean both refuge and risk – it listens to echoes of displacement and longing, tracing the ways in which memory, faith, and intimacy are held.

As a Muslim filmmaker from India who has experienced living abroad for several years, I have always found a sense of home in the visible presence of South Asian Muslim communities around me. While these communities are not homogeneous, their cultural and spiritual engagements in the corners of several European cities are often shared and familiar. Many times I’ve approached the cities through the lens of these small corners.

“Naz̤ar” attempts to relive the encounters with the people I’ve met here – traces of exchanges in neighborhood cafes, makeshift mosques, Ramadan evenings, half-sung songs – held in fragments of sound, image, and text.

The word “Naz̤ar” resonates with meanings such as “behold,” “gaze,” “surveillance,” and extends to “evil eye” in several South Asian languages. It carries a weight – sometimes protective, sometimes perilous. “Naz̤ar” can bless or wound, veil or expose, carry desire or suspicion: it is the unseen residue of looking.

I began thinking about this project in 2023, when I spent a few months living just across Acharnon Street in Athens. I was drawn to the neighborhoods in this area, shaped by the presence of migrant communities from across the world. Here, lives lived in fragments and precarity reshape how we come to know, sense, and inhabit urban space. In these corners, the future of the city seemed to be slowly rehearsing itself.

The life around Acharnon stayed with me long after I left Athens. I wanted to return. In 2025, just before the month of Ramadan, I came back as an Onassis AiR Fellow and began working on “Naz̤ar”, a layered exploration of migrant realities in the city, shaped by questions of visibility. The project asks how engaging with these lived experiences might open up new ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the urban space. As I have come to understand it, “Naz̤ar” also reflects on the spatial politics of urban marginality, and the need to reclaim space in the face of ghettoization and the structural invisibility of migrant lives.

During the residency, I met many South Asian migrants who had reached Greece – a dreaming edge of Europe within migrant imaginaries – after long and difficult journeys by land and sea, crossing Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey. Many had spent over a decade in legal limbo in Greece. I began gathering fragments from memory, dreams, rituals, and daily life. These conversations were not structured interviews but slow, intuitive exchanges in tea shops, on walks to the metro, while waiting for paperwork. These moments came together as a kind of diary, made of sound, image, and stories shared.

I was able to collaborate with other artists, cultural workers, and members of the South Asian Muslim community in Athens who welcomed me into their spaces. I was particularly struck by how migrant life in Athens, while precarious, is also rich with cultural and spiritual continuity – makeshift mosques in dark basements, Urdu poetry on walls, naat sessions and iftar gatherings, involuntary chai walks to Jan Cafe. I approached the work with openness and without fixed outcomes, recording sounds, filming textures of daily life, noting what was said and what remained unsaid.

By the end of the residency, I created a film from the material collected over these months, a first glimpse into what will become a wider body of work. “Naz̤ar” is now growing into a long-term project across different European cities – a series of films and sonic pieces shaped by the experiences of migration and faith. The Onassis AiR program offered the time and a productive space to begin this journey. And Athens – I couldn’t have asked for a kinder city to start from.