CLOSING TODAY Afrah Shafiq: Nobody Knows For Certain

Afrah Shafiq’s Nobody Knows for Certain is a multimedia game that draws on the illustrated children’s books that were distributed widely in India by the USSR, highlighting a little-known chapter of Cold War-era cultural exchange. These richly illustrated Soviet fairytales and folk stories shaped many childhood memories and are now the subject of a thriving subculture of collectors across South Asia.

Nobody Knows For Certain is an anthology of stories developed through a field research fellowship with the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, alongside an archive Shafiq has built of Soviet children’s books across Indian languages and oral testimonies gathered during her research. Sitting between interactive fiction, documentary and point-and-click adventure games, the work invites players to collect books virtually, find portals from one tale to the next and move through archival findings and historical backdrops that trace how two seemingly disparate lands were closely tied to one another.

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