About
Born and raised in Karachi, Halar Soomro is an artist, cultural researcher, and an archivist currently based in Maastricht. Moving across installation, text, video and performance art, and archival material, Halar’s practice delves into the intersections of memory, displacement, and post-colonial identities. Rooted in his family’s migration following the 1947 Partition of India, his work questions the idea of post-colonial Pakistan and what it means to have inherited a fractured homeland. His practice incorporates interdisciplinary methods, including multimedia installations, digitization of familial artifacts, field trips,oral history documentation,ethnographic research and textile. Motivated by a deep desire to challenge fabricated socio-political divides within South Asia, Halar’s work fosters a nuanced understanding of liberation, emphasizing cultural reclamation and collective healing amidst fragmented histories.
A graduate of the Maastricht Institute of Arts, Halar has exhibited extensively across Europe, including his ongoing project Ghar: Frames of Recollected Memories, showcased at Dutch Design Week, Landbouwbelang Maastricht and VOX-POP Amsterdam. His video works Nani, Karachi, and I is an earnest exploration of his grandmother’s migration to post-Partition Karachi, having to sculpt her life from the fragments of a divided homeland, blending restored family archives, intimate interviews, and recreated memories in an effort to collectively remember inherited trauma.
This video work, contirbutes to a larger and ongoing research question of his inherited fractured home - Pakistan. He is currently working on an art publication titled, “Ghar: Volume I”, comprising his field notes, diary scans, maps, and sribbles of home from his trip to Pakistan in the fall of 2023.
Halar is one of the founding members of tu.la.lit, a cross-continental platform for post-colonial co-research through sonic mapping and street culture, alongside his ex-art academy contemporaries.
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Karachi, PK | Maastricht, NL
52.3676° N, 4.9041° E