Hamara Forums > Legends > Mohd Rafi > Members
Nihaal Faizal
Premise
As an artist, Nihaal Faizal usually begins his work in response to an already existing cultural document – frequently one that exists in the form of a media document. These documents may be highly specific (such as the computer desktop backgrounds used in Landscape Photographs, 2014) or stand-in for a type of document ( family photographs, as activated in Hotel ABAD, 2016). Sometimes, these documents are showcased with little change to their original structure and form and at other times, an entire artistic production is devoted to a single document (as in the case of the documentary film Mohammed Rafi Fan Blog, 2017).
For this residency, Faizal began by revisiting his film Mohammed Rafi Fan Blog, 2017, using that as a way to explore an online space of fandom for popular Indian cinema and its music.
Dedicated to playback singers of Indian cinema from the twentieth century, Hamara Forums serves as a venue for fandom, enabling an online platform for discussions about popular music and peer-to-peer file sharing. Its members, primarily residents and diaspora of the Indian subcontinent, contribute their time, ideas and resources to the forum, marking it as a space to cultivate friendship and community, while sharing access to and enabling the exchange of otherwise hardly accessible materials pertaining to their favourite singers. Since its birth in 2003, the forum continues to remain accessible, though it neither allows for new members to join, nor is as active as it was just a decade ago.
Amongst Hamara Forum’s many dedicated members is the artist’s uncle, Mohammed Parvez, who ran a fan blog for his favourite singer, Mohammed Rafi. He utilised the forum to actively promote his efforts with the blog, while also mining it for content he could upload and reshare. The fan blog, which he began in 2007, no longer exists, with all its content having been deleted following a personal tragedy in 2014. Whatever is left of that blog now remains only as traces in the forum’s pages, alongside the residues of fandom of thousands of other individuals.
Building onto the film Mohammed Rafi Fan Blog, 2017, also on view in the exhibition Network Culture, the book Hamara Forums > Legends > Mohd Rafi > Members looks at the online forum www.hamaraforums.com, founded in 2003, and active to this day. It examines the space of the forum as a site for public fandom, dedicated to Indian playback singers from the 20th century, while linking that to the story of the artist’s uncle.
Process
During the residency, the book was built systematically as a manual database or directory-like structure, and filled with information about all members currently active on the pages dedicated to Mohammed Rafi on Hamara Forums. The information includes username, profile picture, membership type, number of posts, joining date, membership number, and any digital signatures the members may have included along with their posts. Whilst membership information tells us about the forum audience’s geographic and demographic diversity, digital signatures point to the existence of an earlier internet. Subsequently, the project becomes an archive of fandom, of online communities and their admiration for popular media of their generation, and of this early version of the internet many of us have never known.
Outcomes
The outcome of this project is a publication in the form of an archival directory, listing the collected membership information in an extensive table. This is presented along with a short note on the project, and a text on membership guidelines found on the Hamara Forums website. As a manual record and tactile object, the book preserves an earlier online space, while also keeping intact traces of the fandom of hundreds of individuals. Taking up space in a room, or eventually a bookshelf, the book solidifies and preserves the spirit of fandom, expressions of admiration, and notions of community established based on a mutual love for Mohammed Rafi between its members. The book’s simple design, which highlights the architecture of the forum’s posts, while also retaining fonts and design elements as found on the website, preserves traces not just of the members and their fandom, but also of the forum itself, nostalgically recalling an earlier Internet.
ABOUT THE RESIDENT
Nihaal Faizal
Born in 1994, Bangalore, India
Nihaal Faizal (b. 1994, Bangalore) is an artist and publisher based in Bangalore, India. His work responds to the copy, the replica, the remake, the gadget, and the gimmick, often reflecting upon media documents from popular and cultural memory. In 2018, he founded Reliable Copy, a publishing house dedicated to works, projects, and writing by artists