Karimah Hassan: Art as a Tool for Healing

0:00Karimah Hassan:In 2018, that's when things really started to move and I had this now like beautiful relationship with my body. But back then, as the burnout happened, it's because I got really ill and then I had to like stop and assess things. And what I thought was inflammation and the doctors couldn't heal it, it turned out so much it was just like stress. I was just actually in deep anxiety and stress. And so as I started to calm my nervous system and then have this relationship with my body and not be on like a nine to five schedule, but be on my schedule, I realise how in tune with the moon we are and how in tune with the cycles of the seasons.

0:37I've been wanting to get my friend, artist and beautiful soul, Karima, on the podcast for so long, so I'm so glad that we've been able to make this happen. Welcome to The Slowdown, your time to redefine success and growth on your own terms with a little help from others. Karima Hassan is a Yemeni Welsh Bangladeshi artist, writer and performer whose practice spans large-scale paintings, spoken word and socially driven storytelling. Her work has been exhibited in London, New York, Toronto and the Middle East with collectors ranging from Vogue editors to global institutions. Trained as an architect, her practice merges structure with soul, focusing on themes of diaspora, belonging, beauty and visibility.

1:17Whether through her paintings, her newsletter, her weekly poem cast or her vivid public murals, Karima creates work that invites communion, courage and celebration. In this episode we speak about identity, finding your rhythm and redefining success through creativity, beauty and community. Hello Karima, welcome to The Slowdown, thanks for being here. I'm so glad that we've finally been able to make time to make this happen you are currently off the back of a big show in Ibiza and about to head to Lebanon for a residency can you explain to listeners what a residency is and why you chose these two places

1:56Karimah Hassan:and what painting in this way does for you a residency is to me a block of time in an intended place where you're going to create something with an output in mind and it's kind of like an incubator for a project and usually with a residency it includes a location ideally some somewhere like a studio I chose Ibiza and Lebanon um kind of they chose me slightly as well like I chose them because I love the light there I love the the aliveness there and like the sexiness of the island in Ibiza and the sexiness of Lebanon the people are really joyful and vibrant and just fun and generous and warm and there's like this reverence for like the magic realm that in other parts of the world it kind of the spiritual stays at like a certain level of the mind and cerebral but in Ibiza and Lebanon like the spiritual is really tangible there as well it's very much like we'll dance it out or we'll share we'll invite you over dinner or we'll like talk about things over conversation and I love that feeling of like it's relevant today and then the Yeah, they chose me because I first went to Ibiza years ago and I loved it.

3:12Karimah Hassan:And I didn't think I'd ever be there creating art like where I am now. And same with Beirut. Like I went there for the first time kind of serendipitously by accident. And then once I was there, I fell in love with the place. And then it kind of just very quickly became like, how can I come here again and create here? So, yeah, I love that. Well, I'm always interested, especially on this show, about the genesis of things. So I'm wondering, how were you raised? By whom? And where? And how did that kind of influence your early understandings? Okay, so I was raised in South Wales in this little place called Newport, which is just outside Cardiff.

3:51Karimah Hassan:I was raised mainly by my mother. And we grew up in a house with my mum, my brother, my sister. And then I have three younger sisters from different mothers. So kind of like a blended family. and I spent my childhood going back and forth between my father like visiting him in Devon and so it was this kind of upbringing of being in Wales but always tapping out and kind of having these like adventures by the seaside or trying to fill time in like pockets of weekends with nothing to do and my dad being amazing and just trying to find ways to kind of entertain us but for free so we spent a lot of time like in HMV like going from Cardiff to Devon and we would just like stop over in Bristol and go to HMV and just like listen to records for two hours and things like that but then my mum she's a primary school teacher so my upbringing was very kind of like homely cozy Islam was a very much like an umbrella backbone in our family and so we had the culture of mixed identity pop culture western pop culture mixed with like some Islamic references and then also So just for me, creativity was like always my safe haven.

5:05Karimah Hassan:So I wasn't really like the kid that was into like Barbie dolls and like dressing up. I love going away and playing with like plasticine or making like things out of like shoeboxes or watching art attack and just like getting lost to these worlds. But no one in my family like made creativity their vocation. It was very much like doctors, teachers, civil servants. So yeah, I kind of just did things by the book. I was really academic and studious. I just wanted to make my mum proud. And then I went into architecture, really studied philosophy and design and space. But I always had this kind of like this thing of creativity was my safe haven.

5:41Karimah Hassan:And I didn't really think it could be anything more than a hobby. And I didn't know how to like surpass my own expectations of like, how do I bridge this thing and let this thing be my source of income, my source of validation, my source of fulfillment. and then I kind of just had through like many years just like find like bridges between like my architecture education and then ways to become creative and then that's where I landed to where I'm at now but it took a little bit of yeah like softening through each step of the way because I think with every upbringing and identity there was like a certain identity that I had with it so I had to kind of allow that to shift and mold.

6:22What were some of the first projects that happened after architecture as you went into art that felt like I still have one foot in and one foot out and the structure of this life and the expectation of who I should be and have a serious job maybe versus this creative life I want to pursue what were your first kind of ways in?

6:41Karimah Hassan:They were like Trojan horse jobs so they would be like doing the graphic design for a museum exhibition and so I kind of like had some freelance opportunity I had some like choice of who I worked with another example was I did like interning at an advertising company or I did interning at a light projection company where they like did the graphics on the side of buildings in Prague I just had like a lot of like weird little creative jobs I cat sat around London to get free rent so that I could like try out this kind of like weird prototype kind of lifestyle I was willing to make a sacrifice of a like level of safety at that point just because I had this taste of what it's like to be in control of your own time.

7:25And what was the first time that you really felt this project feels like I'm an artist like this really feels like I've you know done away with the safety net of this really practical potential career and this feels like I'm now very much an artist.

7:39Karimah Hassan:I think it was when I was first in New York because I'd up until that point I'd kind of had like sketchbooks I was like like toying with the idea of art but I still didn't ever know how it could become financial and so at the end of the phone he just said to me like this is not how you do it like we approach the artist and he's kind of like oh honey like that's not how it works and then he just kind of like took pity on me and said there's this website where they show residencies and I was like oh okay what's a residency and then I realized oh it's this thing where you can go and you can create and you're somehow provided money or like some kind of pocket of time where you can just experiment and then I sent out to this one in New York and to me New York was always a dream to go to so to be able to then get a chance to like go to New York I gave myself that license of like okay for three months no one needs to know like I don't need to justify myself I'm just gonna go and see what happens and then I was around artists for the first time ever and I just remember like it was everything I wanted sweaty nights in the basement of like Lower East Side 50 artists coming in at different hours in the day and I was never around artists before but just like seeing how how they had my spirit of just like curiosity of make first think later and then that was like all well and good in terms of like identity belonging but I remember it was the first time where um somebody bought my work and that was the first time somebody had paid that wasn't a token gesture of but like no like this is value and you're gonna go up in value and to me that was like a game changer because I remember just thinking oh my gosh I can make money from something that I love and it doesn't have to be this trade-off of my values and that was the first time that like it gave me enough of like a window to see it could happen yeah a lot of artists have a particular style that they're known for I'm wondering how you developed and found your style because I think you do have a very particular style like I can always tell it's your work yeah well Neil Gaiman has that you know that quote like so there's this Harvard speech and I love and he has this like the quote that says you have to sound a lot like other people before you can find your voice and I think in even an art school I would always like look at artists and see what I liked and didn't like but even when I go back and look at sketchbooks from 14 all my mum still has like a painting from when I was a teenager in the house I can see my style and I think it's something about I always like a painting to be something but to leave enough abstraction to like put your impression in it and I don't like things that are too perfect when I paint because I like to have my layer of like interpretation and I think that was always the case and I think it was always the case that I liked like this thing of like the raw so I like to see brush marks I like to see the canvas I like to see that it's not perfect and I didn't really intentionally say like I'm gonna develop this style but I just have something that I like and I think that has kind of been the signature in a way and it's like even though maybe the subject matter changes and I do portraits or landscapes or like illustration there's like this kind of boldness and color and like like spirit that comes across um but it's not intentional like I never kind of like had like a I just basically like go with what my sim what symbols I like what color combinations I like and then I give myself the license to change as well because I think my favorite artists have always like shown evolution I love that Neil Gaiman quote and so who are some of the voices that you liked initially um Matisse Picasso Faith Ringgold Michael Armitage these are just painters um Jenny Jenny Saville um Tom O 'Campbell Cecily Brown these are all like really like really beautiful painters but then in terms of artists I look to people like um yeah like I don't know I think about people like Nina Simone Maya Angelou India Ari um Kendrick Lamar like people that they have like an album and then they change the album sound but they have they always have the same kind of like message music was the big one that always like was my my like a big inspiration um and I don't know why but I definitely see color and music as like two two the same things do you have synesthesia I didn't know it was that until I listened to the you know the the Pharrell the lego thing there's like a lego film with Pharrell and he's telling his story and then I realized that that's what I have and yeah I didn't really know it was that.

12:18Karimah Hassan:Where you listen to music and you see color? Yeah yeah massively. What are your favorite colors at the moment? I'm going through a big cobalt blue phase and gold gold and cobalt blue which are quite like Egyptian quite regal quite protective. Like Yves Klein? It's always been my one of my favorite colors it's very like opulent and um and you mentioned music and I know that one of the things that you you did quite early on was enjoy going to see live music or see people dancing and paint them in the moment why was that something that you explored and is that still something you do what is it that you love about that I think I had this real block around like art schools and art and like anywhere where art was kind of like formally taught because I wasn't taught in art and I think that there was this kind of block in my head of like you have to come from a certain wealth class to be able to be an artist and you have to like have certain kind of credentials and I didn't feel comfortable in those spaces but I wanted to to do art and I wanted to like do life drawing and at that point I didn't really have much disposable income.

13:30Karimah Hassan:To go back to like the signature for me I think one of my signatures is like I can capture an essence like quite quickly one of my skills was always I can look at someone's form and then just get it down really quickly and just get like the essence of something and so I thought okay well how do I strengthen that and to me like drawing someone who's moving is like one of the hardest things but it's the best way to capture like essence of people so I didn't really have the money to do life drawing and I always love being around dancers and musicians because that's where I feel really at home and like myself so I just said like when people were dancing I would just go up to them and dance that I knew because I knew a lot of dancers in London and I said like can I just draw you while you're performing like can I just sit in the background because there's something really comforting for me being around people that are training like in music and dance you can make mistakes you can like play you can be really emotional and it's like it's fine it's just part of the job and so I like to like sit on the sidelines and then that's when I just started like drawing these people it was like a little cat in the corner of the room like I loved that I felt really comfortable in those spaces and they obviously never asked me for money they just said like yeah come like we were flattered that you want to paint us or you want to draw us and so I was just doing that for about two years it's like I got to like be there when people were like practicing jazz and practicing like their drums or practicing and there's this like improv quality behind all of these forms that I love that I didn't really see in anywhere else in society like this thing of like hey when we're together we just jam and we improv and like you can make mistakes and I think I really like that so that's where I began just sketching and just like teaching myself basically I love that and then you know as somebody that loves that environment where you're watching other creatives and you're involved in that process something like COVID where we couldn't leave the house would have been difficult but even in that time you created this amazing piece of work and so I wanted to know more about the like creative process and journey that that took you to Strangers Yearbook so how did that idea come to mind how did you do that during lockdown and how have you seen that kind of come to life since then?

15:46So just before

15:48Karimah Hassan:lockdown I was really concentrating on communities in London my whole thing was how do I spotlight all of these amazing communities because there are so many people in London that feel lonely and disconnected I know like this open mic this jazz night this dance scene how do I connect people and so my whole work was around that and then when lockdown happened it really affected me because at that point I was getting paid to do like live painting my whole scene was like in real life um and so when that all started to fizzle I remember just thinking straight away like I want to know how you're doing like how are you really doing but that can sometimes like especially in lockdown that was quite like a almost like a heavy question like say how are you doing because like we didn't know how to summarize it so I kind of just said check in with me whenever you're ready and like let me know how you're doing then I realized maybe I can do something where I can offer a service to people where I just check in on them and see how they're doing and give them a chance to like have their story captured so I'd say like let me know how you're doing tell me how you're feeling send me a selfie in lockdown and I'll paint it in return and it was more of this thing of like it was just initially like a way just to check in with people but then the magic started happening when then I had like a I had people who were sharing their stories with me and then when I shared the painting they're like the selfie that I painted and the caption of how they felt other people were then DMing me saying like I feel like this or this makes me feel really okay to feel like this way then I realized okay there's something here then I started having strangers like one degree of separation so a friend of a friend and then I just realized right this can be something really special where I just connect to strangers around the world they send me their selfie which is like quite a vulnerable thing but it became this like archive and then every time I was going to stop like I was just going to do it for one month and it kind of carried on and then we had you know Black Lives Matter that happened so I carried it on through that and then we just kept having like these marker points in the year so I just thought well why not carry it on that then became a book and an exhibition in King's Cross where it became one of those moments of these are some of the magical things that came out of lockdown like it wasn't all doom and gloom like there were some people that kind of made made something from that and I'm glad that like creativity I don't know it's just always been my raft it's always been my thing of like in good times and bad make art and for me that was like something that actually it helped me first it gave me like a sense of purpose during that time how many people was it total it averaged about 350 it was around that between 350 and maybe just above but yeah pretty much one a day yeah like 365 people it's a lot of painting and a beautiful body of work that is a project that was just a totally side passion project for you um on top of all of the other work that you were doing so I'm curious have you ever found yourself in a position with work and and for you it doesn't even necessarily just have to be art it could also be brand partnerships that you do like talent work that you do um where you found yourself like overworked or burnt out or reaching an edge of kind of I'm doing too much and I can feel that yeah um I definitely had burnout when I was in architecture it was these really long days and not much time for like self-care and movement and socializing and fun and I think there was this quite unhealthy culture in architecture where you're expected to work like 14 hour days and then weekends on top of it and just kind of ramp it up around deadlines and then like slow down afterwards but for me like I'm such a heart-led person and have so much like self-drive and I like to choose for myself I think that just didn't work for me long term and so that was like a bit of a burnout moment where I realized like I can't burn out for a cause I'm not passionate about like there's one thing kind of like putting your all into something and you're willing to put the sacrifices in but I think it's another thing when your heart's not for me like when my heart isn't in it it just doesn't feel aligned um now since doing art I probably work more like the hours like I work Monday to Sunday because it doesn't really there's the barrier doesn't dissolve like and I do work long hours but it doesn't feel like work because to me it's like it's one of the things I love doing the most and it's also just I'm at this point where I would sacrifice most things to like build what I'm building um but I also think I slightly have I learned my lesson from the first burnout so when I do see signs my body's really stressed and like I'm running down like maybe x was flaring up and like because my body is so sensitive so I'm the kind of person that if I do start getting stressed I kind of get like my gut tells me my skin tells me like like I kind of can see the signs physically so now I kind of don't even really let it get to that point where like Like if I can feel it and feel the fatigue or feel the burnout come in, I try and address it soon.

21:01Karimah Hassan:I think it also comes like parallel to maturing. So I think a lot of my burnout before used to be people pleasing where I would try and do everything. And I would try and like see the people that I wanted to see me. But I didn't really know how to say like maybe this is not my priority. And now it's just like okay well you've got to bite the bullet. So if work is ramping up, maybe I can't see all my friends for like a season. I wasn't OK with that before. I kind of wanted to do it all. And I think that helps to kind of be a bit more mature about that. This season of The Slowdown is brought to you by Clue, the period and cycle tracking app that goes deeper than dates on a calendar.

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22:56Karimah Hassan:to know what to do it's all about like what you select right and so how do you decide what you say yes to what excites me if there was a trajectory of my career like is this going to push me further is it going to get me the time span like sometimes like it's actually quite nice having a little commission project that you do that you can just put your attention on for two weeks and like it can be a break and then you can so just basically like almost at the trade-off of what is it going to require of me like how much of my time and energy and effort is it going to require of me um and then mainly like I definitely have this idea now of like a win-win so like whether it's the galleries I'm working with the residencies the people my clients I definitely feel like everything can be a win-win in the sense of are they the kind of gallery that I that I want to succeed so that like when my work sells with them or when they represent my work I'm really happy and I want them to do well when you've approached things from like a win-win they can the client can feel that too and there's like this kind of level of like yeah abundance and building longer term relationships like you have such long term relationships with partners and brands and galleries and and places one of the things that I I know about you is your commitment to your rituals and your routines and your like morning practices and things like this and I was wondering if you had like a few tips to share on ways to slow down in the micro in the day-to-day yeah that's definitely where I slow down because my life if on the on the face it It can be quite like I'm traveling around or moving or like projects moving in and out.

24:34Karimah Hassan:So for me, like a level of control is the wrong word. But like, yeah, grounding is like is in the micro. So having like every morning, like an hour and a half that now is my non-negotiable where it's 20 minutes of some kind of presence. So whether that's prayer or meditation or however that might look, 20 minutes of writing, then 20 minutes of painting. because I realized that especially with creativity you can kind of like get in your head about it and if it's this one big thing that you're meant to make like a big project it can become overwhelming but by making it so that every morning I paint in a little sketchbook for 20 minutes it's like it just normalizes the process a daily habit yeah and and then I just make that really transportable so I have like a journal that I carry everywhere I have a small sketchbook so if I'm traveling I've always got a sketchbook so I started off as like morning pages from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way where I started doing like the three pages of writing and then I found so much joy in that and basically didn't realize that journaling was like free therapy and it was just amazing and that was back in 2018 and then that habit became something that I stuck like other things to so then I like had like a little coffee ritual that I stuck it to where I just have coffee and like downtime and then yeah so then basically when life does get busy my morning practice it gets my mind into a place of like safeguarding so that I'm not on other people's time or other people's demands but I'm on my kind of just like my wavelength um and then I have other things so like I do like a weekly reset so every Saturday or Sunday I like look at what I'm grateful for I write down my lessons I write down my reflections and how I'm gonna see the next week going ahead I do like a quarterly check-in where I look at every quarter and like okay where are my goals at where am I going and then I do like a yearly check-in around my birthday and new year's journaling for me is just such a convenient and incredibly reflective process that I like have made into a whole like way of living actually it's so noticeable you as you said really don't react as intensely as other people do to somebody else's energy you know if someone's like antsy and annoyed that would really affect me whereas I feel like you are very much in your own zone and that doesn't affect you as much um I was wondering what role if any do you think art plays in helping us slow down be it through consuming the art or making the art as artists oh I love these are consuming because I didn't think of that but that's so true because it's like the inhale and the exhale I see art is incredibly liberating and cathartic and therapeutic art really helps me to slow down just in the way that it puts me into the pocket just for a little bit like 10 minutes 15 minutes and all of a sudden sometimes that's all I need just to be distracted and just be in my little bubble and then um it can be really confront like confronting at times too because I'll be painting and then these waves of emotions come up and I'm like whoa I didn't oh I didn't want that to come up now or like I'm not ready for that or I don't want that and it is like a form of meditation but what's really cool is that when you're creating whatever it is it's like it allows the emotion to come up and then it gives you enough distance so you can see it was in you but it's not you and so it allows a way of like a catharsis where you can look really kind of monitor emotions and not judge them as good or bad but just like ammunition for what you're making and then yeah I think consuming art is really uh yeah there's a presence in it when you really stop and you listen you put your headphones in and really listen to music or you sit in front of a painting and just watch it and look at each brushstroke and just kind of just imagine yourself painting that and or you when you're at a meal and you really just take your time with a meal and you consume the meal or when you consume with presence as well like that in itself is the act of appreciation and I think that yeah there's obviously like a mass consumption of art right now and that's really changed how we uh work as artists between like that that that divide between content and art um another thought I had was around you know we talk about our lives and different paces and the things that you do at different times in the month and stuff and I was wondering how aware are you of your cycle during the course of a month does your routine or your art change at all during your cycle yeah I love that question because that's been so basically my life path has braided between as I started meditating that's when I started like a deep practice of forgiveness and found art and the three kind of like forgiveness presence and art all kind of find their way into my life in 2018 and then that's when things really started to move and I had this now like beautiful relationship with my body but back then as the burnout happened just because I got really ill and then I had to like stop and assess things.

29:53Karimah Hassan:As I started following art and presence I became more attuned to my body and how it reacts to like the moon and I never realized before like the moon can affect you and what I thought was leaky gut and what I thought was inflammation and the doctors couldn't heal it, it turned out so much it was just like stress. I was just actually in deep anxiety and stress and so as I started to calm my nervous system and then have this relationship with my body and not be on like a nine to five schedule but be on my schedule I realized like how in tune with the moon we are and how in tune with the cycles of the seasons this kind of conversation with my womanhood and my womb and my cycle it became this like really glorious thing where I didn't realize it's not just a case of like I think my whole teenage years was like the your cycle is something that is shameful and should be hidden and should not be talked about and you kind of just like put on a brave face and go through it and should be like a stable energy and I didn't realize that it was okay to to be weak and fatigued at some point in the month and then be like high octane on other points I think the blessing in being freelance and working for myself is I'm even more tuned to my own energy a week before my cycle I am like going to be really tired and that's okay and it's not judgmental and I don't have to like feel sorry about that and then the blessings that then come through with that are I started noticing that my creativity really amps up like the luteal just for the week before your period comes on so like for me that's a point where I get really intuitive and I'm really creative and it makes so much sense because really like our bodies and our like spiritual and emotional bodies they're going through like a process of release and so there's this kind of deep going internal time and now I realize okay actually that's when I get my most downloads that's when I get the most insight that's when I get the most intuitive and if I was to journal or to write or plan like that's the good time to kind of like not necessarily sow the seeds but to just to create and just to release and to move things and then as I'm like on my ovulation that's probably the best time to do like podcasts or meetings or networking and it's also the time that I'm least like sensitive to energy I realized like just before my period and during I'm way more sensitive and like fragile and again I used to like almost shame that part and be like oh if I just need to cry like that's not good and I kind of had this upbringing of it's not okay to be sensitive but now I realize oh it's just because we're so sensitive during that time that creativity is enhanced and I think that um yeah there's some painters that like paint with using their blood or they like kind of like but to me it's not even about that it's just about like being so in tune with your body that it's okay to be with the seasons that you're in and to see that there's power of creativity that dips and ebbs within that it's important to tell these like more positive stories of what's possible on your period because i think our society tends to be like pms or like you're complaining if you're in pain and this kind of thing and actually discovering the times of the month when you're like superpowers are at their most potent is a totally different narrative of women and periods yeah like i think that like when you're ovulating there's a superpower of just being able to walk into a room and just like shine and be like yeah let's go like let's move things let's shake like shake things up and then there's also a power and just no I need to go internal now yeah that is a superpower what's your working definition of success now oh um something about it's so it's like I don't have I don't have one on top of my tongue but it's something about like peace of mind

33:54Karimah Hassan:radiance to me what is really important right now is building like building like projects foundation community and people so I would be doing myself the service to say that my vision of success doesn't encapsulate that but it's like how can I build and create what I'm here to do but from a place of radiance and peace of mind at the same time because I haven't really seen that modeled as much like I've seen people that go after their dreams and make but then there's usually a sacrifice of their health and vitality or their peace of mind so for me that is really successful if you can create and do what you're meant to be doing and like go to bed at peace and have enough energy to kind of stay feeling young and fresh that is successful I mean it might change I'm sure but yeah that feels like kind of what's important to me right now you've had the opportunity to meet some incredible people over the course of your career is there anyone that comes to mind as like a really interesting personal interaction that you met and had oh yeah I've got one actually um Vera Wang randomly uh on the Eurostar it was magical because you know we were sat opposite each accidentally and I was with my like girlfriend and we were we were on like a work trip and we got separated from the group so the two of us were like on a table sat across Vera Wang and her um like friend but we didn't know it was Vera Wang so I was reading Anna Wintour's book and then she was like oh how is that and I was like yeah it's great like just telling her everything and then we got talking and then we were just chatting and then but what I really loved was just how she wasn't on her phone she wasn't she was so generous with like her curiosity I remember thinking like that's how you get really great at what you're doing like you just remain like humble and you remain like in that learning mindset where even if you think you're the best in the game and other people tell you you're the best in the game you don't yeah yeah that's what I love about what I'm doing now is that like somehow it could be the way that I get to meet people that like were once my role models and like that is a really fun experience to live in life where you're like oh I could who knows like I could work with this person like it's not anything's on the table now which is fun I think yeah yeah and you know you mentioned at the beginning um you're a mix of nationalities and identities and I was speaking to somebody recently about being an immigrant and how you try so hard to assimilate to the culture that you're in in the UK and as you get older perhaps you reinvigorate this interest in in your nationalities and I'm wondering yeah if there was a stage in your life where you kind of dove back into that or if it's always been a constant like it's been really clear to you like I am these things or if there was a kind of turning point when you wanted to learn more and know more about that and how you weave that into your your kind of current understanding of self.

37:02Karimah Hassan:I am Welsh, Yemeni and Bangladeshi and the split is my mum both their parents from Bangladesh and then my dad he's half Welsh half Yemeni and so and like so growing up um like I said my mum raised me so I had kind of a bit of a Bangladeshi influence but she we kind of like had our own little community of just people that were like self-made and Brit like British and stuff so that wasn't the main influence and then I kind of grew up in Wales where there wasn't much multicultural influence so for me like the real kind of craving to find this sense of belonging first I had it when I was like in uni and I started making friends with kids that were expat kids and that was the first time ever like I had friends that were kind of had this feeling of belonging but not belonging and I kind of was like oh this is what I've been searching for the whole time and then it was really only when I came to London that I really just felt like this sense of belonging of I'm all of these things I'm this like mix but I'm British and like it's so quintessentially British to have a lot of these mixes of cultures and then for me the real kind of craving to do the family lineage work is actually connected to my cycle and connected to my womb and as I started meditating and kind of just like going internally I realized that like especially as women we hold so many memories in our bodies and that like emotional body sometimes we're carrying emotions that aren't ours but they've been passed down from our grandparents or our parents or our sisters and families and I never really thought that that just sounded like um like slightly witchy or slightly like surely not yeah but actually it's so until you experience it and you can experience like the disproportionate maybe reaction you have to something that is not necessarily your memory but it could be a memory from a parent and it's lived through you like that to me became like this new curiosity of I want to do the forensic work of finding out why I'm like this and why certain things trigger me and why certain things I feel like I need to express and then that kind of was like okay let me do this family work and why do I have this strong connection to this ancestor who never even raised me but I feel like I'm connected to and so for me like that was really interesting I hold the DNA and some memories that aren't even my memories and kind of want to look into that and I think that just as like we kind of start really respecting mental health now I think going forwards we're probably going to really respect this idea of like generational lineage and trauma and gifts and really like not just dismiss it but actually see okay if your parents did go through or did survive trauma or if you're a baby and you survived trauma those are parts of our emotions to be looked at and for me that was connected to my womb and my cycle and like as I started becoming more reverent of my cycle I saw that kind of come up.

40:05The last question that I always ask everybody is if I had to watch one film or read one book or go see one piece of art to get to know you better or help me understand you better what would it be

40:17Karimah Hassan:and why okay the book would be letters to a young poet by rilke and i've got like so many copies but this one copy i have like four things underlined so faith self uh love and purpose and like he just goes through everything in that book and it's written between rilke and his student and it's just like a life life lesson book but it's only like 80 pages and it just has so much history in there um and then film either inception because I love dreams and the mind and like the power of the mind to sculpt reality so probably inception or um city of god which I love just because of the grit and the romance and the soul and then um artwork if you can I just love the Rothko room emanate just because that whole room is just like a meditative experience and I never really understood the whole thing with Rothko until I was like maybe like 15 and in that room and then it kind of made sense it's not just about the one painting and what it depicts but it's about like transporting you into a different dimension which you just have to like be absorbed in these colors um so yeah those three I love that thank you so much for sharing and thank you for being here Thank you for having me.

41:44Thank you for tuning in. This episode was posted and created by me, Tiana Tambridge. It was produced by Whitney Rosenthal, with sound and video produced and recorded at Brazen Studios. Cover art and design by Natalia Ruhe, and the sponsor for this whole season is Clue. Please subscribe to The Slowdown to be notified of upcoming episodes, tell a friend, and leave a review, because it really helps a podcast like this get out there into the world. And remember, we're all heading to the same destination and there is no prize for getting there early, so we might as well slow down.