Practising Empathy in Mirrors

Practising Empathy in Mirrors is a multidisciplinary publishing and film project exploring the intersections of Muslimness, South Asian-ness, politics, and spirituality. Rooted in community, memory, and lived experience, the project engages photography, moving image, oral history, and text to create intimate yet politically resonant works.

Through self-published archives and photography-led zines, we document overlooked narratives, everyday rituals, and intergenerational presence, particularly within diasporic Muslim communities. Each publication functions as both a mirror and an offering: a space to see ourselves reflected with tenderness, and to encounter others with care.

Our work resists spectacle and instead honours the quiet, the devotional, and the ordinary. We create art that speaks to the soul, foregrounding empathy as method, archive as resistance, and storytelling as a spiritual practice.

AAPNE, Practising Empathy in Mirrors, 2012

The AAPNE zine is a glimpse into British Pakistani youth culture on the internet in the early 2000s. From the graveyard of inactive Facebook accounts to YouTube rap videos from 20 years ago, offering a glimpse into the visual culture that surrounded Pakistani youth in the inner cities of Bradford, Birmingham and beyond. Crime, cars, gang signs and questionable haircuts run rampant.

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The Far Right Twitter Archive, Practising Empathy in Mirrors, 2024

After spending a year operating through an alternative Twitter account, I immersed myself in the ecosystem of Far-Right Twitter, documenting and archiving the memes, coded language, and streams of hateful vitriol that circulate there in an attempt to critically examine and capture the mechanics of its digital culture.

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