BAQĀ/بقا (The Unforgotten) by Mursal Mohammadi at The Image Centre

BAQĀ / بقا (The Unforgotten) explores the 1997 kidnapping of the artist's uncle in Afghanistan. Through film, textiles, and sound, the exhibition investigates intergenerational trauma, silence, and how women preserve memory in the face of loss.

Overview

In 1997, during a period of civil war and political violence in Afghanistan, my uncle Baqauddin was kidnapped. My family—grandparents, his wife, and siblings—spent years searching for him and writing to government officials, holding onto the hope that he might return. No one answered their letters. To this day we have no news of his whereabouts or what happened to him.

Although this event predates my birth, it has shaped my family across generations. I came to know my uncle through stories passed down over time. His framed photograph in our home became a quiet symbol of his presence, revealing how absence can be felt as vividly as presence. The project takes its title from his name, Baqauddin, derived from baqā, meaning endurance or survival. BAQĀ / بقا (The Unforgotten) explores how memory and intergenerational trauma circulate through family life, domestic space, and the body.

At the centre of the installation is a film that weaves together scenes from my uncle’s wedding, family archives, interviews, and personal narration. Archival photographs and documents appear alongside recorded conversations, tracing how memory moves through storytelling, silence, and emotional inheritance. Sound functions as an intimate element: recordings of my father singing and oral storytelling become forms of embodied memory and healing, while my own voice situates the archive within lived experience. My many questions highlighting all that is still unknown.

The installation includes a textile work featuring a photograph of my uncle taken before his kidnapping, printed onto fabric and embroidered with traditional Afghan patterns. The embroidery foregrounds the role women play in sustaining memory and carrying emotional labour within the family. Additional photographs and documents bear witness to histories of loss and political violence. I approach these materials with care and responsibility: the archival objects remain unaltered. My role is to preserve them and make visible what has long been carried in silence.

— Mursal Mohammadi

About The Artist

Mursal Mohammadi is an MFA candidate in Documentary Media at Toronto Metropolitan University and a multidisciplinary artist working with memory, family history, and the archive. Her practice moves between photography, oral histories, moving image, and archival materials, paying attention to how personal and collective histories are carried, held, and reworked over time. Mohammadi's work is shaped by a close engagement with family photographs, stories, and records, and the ways these materials continue to hold presence across generations. This thesis exhibition brings together these threads through image, sound, and archival material, reflecting on absence, remembrance, and how we relate to what is no longer physically present.