Queen of the Night (Raat Ki Raani)

Alina Akbar presents Queen of the Night (Raat Ki Rani), a multi-artform exhibition transforming a 1955 Pakistani family-owned cash and carry warehouse in Rochdale into an immersive nocturnal installation.

Developed from late night car conversations between young Muslim women, the exhibition moves across photography, sculpture, sound and film to explore girlhood, folklore, and the gendered experience of the streets after dark. Reimagining the locally iconic Haji Cash & Carry building as a site of cultural memory, the project questions what constitutes heritage and whose spaces are deemed worthy of preservation.

Unfolding beneath the same streetlights that once signalled it was time to go home, the exhibition returns to communal after-hours storytelling. These imagined fears are placed in dialogue with the structural realities of adulthood, surveillance, expectation, marriage, ageing, and responsibility, revealing how stories intended to protect can also confine.

Throughout the installation, devotional references are playfully reworked into sculptural gestures, while commercial youth iconography is enlarged and subverted, critiquing the double standards and quiet scrutiny that shape contemporary Muslim girlhood.

Blurring humour and unease, superstition and lived reality, Queen of the Night considers the moment when imagined fears give way to lived ones and how ordinary moments after dark can hold quiet acts of resistance.

The exhibition marks Akbar’s first solo exhibition and an expansion of practice into spatial installation. The project was commissioned by Culture Co-op, part of Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme for Rochdale and further supported by Touchstones Art Gallery.

Saturday, 28th March | 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Haji Cash & Carry

Station Approach, Rochdale, OL11 1HG

Located opposite Rochdale Railway Station |15 mins from Manchester Victoria.

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Refreshments: Light refreshments will be served.

Dress warmly: As the venue is a warehouse, please wear layers to stay comfortable.

Booking Essential: Places are strictly limited.

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General Exhibition Opening Times:

• Thursday 26 March: 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM
• Friday 27 March: 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM
• Saturday 28 March: 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM
• Sunday 29 March: 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM