We’re Just Trying to Learn How to Love by Hamza Ashraf is a deeply personal collection of ephemera spanning three years
For most of us, there comes a point in our youth when we begin to feel flushed of romantic love. It begins with a search for closeness. Then, a rush of romance and lust that can quickly tumble into jealousy, resentment, and heartbreak. Emotions collide and spiral, against and with one another, with nothing but blind trust as guidance. With each bump and blip, we gradually untangle these experiences, learning about ourselves and how we relate to others.
This journey of first loves and self-discovery is the subject of Hamza Ashraf’s multi-disciplinary documentary project. Three years in the making, the autobiographical work has spanned film, installation and photography, made and exhibited in their current home city, Leeds. Now, the project reaches its finale in a zine format: We’re Just Trying to Learn How to Love. A flow of text and image, it presents a mix of archival photos and reenacted memories, intertwined with poems and diary entries. We see Polaroids of intimate moments shared between lovers, alongside confessions in black biro, scrawled onto journal pages.
As an object, this zine encapsulates a formative era in Ashraf’s life, navigating love, friendships, and leaving home for the first time. At 19, they moved from Qatar to study art and filmmaking in Leeds. This change, along with a yearning for intimacy – inevitably heightened by Covid-19 restrictions – inspired their artistic output. They tell Dazed, “I was fascinated with how we were all trying to navigate this weird tug and pull of how to be intimate, and how to have relationships with people.”
Growing up, Ashraf’s uncle had intensely documented their family life. “There are endless film rolls, cassettes and photos, packed away in a huge box that I love to rummage through,” they say. “I always hoped one day, when I got to move abroad, I would do the same and build my own archive as a way to mark my experiences.”
Ashraf worked almost exclusively with analogue cameras, from point-and-shoots to medium format, Super 8, VHS camcorders, and Polaroids. The slowness of film, combined with its ties to nostalgia and ephemerality, appealed to them. They explain, “I wanted it to feel as though you were finding a box of memories from someone’s past life.”
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In 2022, Ashraf held their first exhibition of the work, with their then-collective D&I. Presenting the film on various TV screens, they invited viewers to journal as a real-time response to the work. The result was transformative. “I realised that subconsciously, we’re all going through the same experiences in our own specific ways… That gave me comfort.”
Following the final installation of their film work, Ashraf launched the zine in April 2024. “I always thought the ending should be when I’d moved on from my codependency, and welcomed all the precious and lovely things in my life,” they confide. “Coincidentally, I ended up falling in love in the midst of that.”
The zine ends with tender images of Ashraf with their current partner. “I ended up looking back at everything with a mature lens,” they say. There is a sense of poetry in the project’s final form. After years of expressing the motions of love and self-discovery, a sense of peace in the stillness. After all the heartache, situationships, lost loves and search for belonging, “in a way, this zine is like a final goodbye to all of it”.
Hamza Ashraf’s We’re Just Trying to Learn How to Love is available to order here now