Asif Mian

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

My practice begins with the body: its movements, its wounds, its capacity to remember, and its tendency to leave traces. I work across sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, and film, using physical processes of cutting, embedding, splicing, staining, welding, and reconstruction to turn fragments of experience into material form. The ongoing RAF project began with an unresolved event: the murder of my father and the unidentified person who remains at the center of the case. I approach the event through its physical residues—eyewitness descriptions, forensic reports, landscapes, clothing, vehicles, architecture, and objects. These fragments are cut apart, combined, distorted, and reassembled. Fabric is embedded into metal. Surfaces are stained and polished. Industrial materials are joined with domestic ones. Evidence becomes sculpture; sculpture becomes a prop; the prop becomes part of a performance. For video, I use my own body and the bodies of performers as instruments of investigation. We rehearse gestures of intimidation, fear, confrontation, vulnerability, aggression, and release, allowing psychological states to become physical actions. Thermal cameras extend this bodily investigation into another register, tracing heat rather than appearance. My debut short film, Have You Seen Me? (2026), features six variants of the RAF suspect who return to the crime scene as invisible Djinn, haunting a forensic investigation. The human figure becomes a field of energy, a...

Artwork