Bio
I am an artist and a cultural explorer with a plethora of mediums like performance, archiving, and video as my primary instruments. Born into a family with the harrowing legacy of the Indian Partition of 1947, my artistic wandering navigates the blurred boundaries between colonial depletion and its aftermath. At its core, my work dismantles the colonial gaze, forging an identity from this historical trauma. My current practice seeks to employ personal testimonies and memories as directional pieces of information to highlight the nuances often overlooked by Western historical discourse when engaging with neocolonial systems. What I try to create with my art is an unbridled expression of the human experience that argues against the violent and exploitative systems cursing the global south.
Primarily focusing on the Sub-continental region, my current video work, “گھر” [Ghar | Home], focuses on the story of my Nani and her struggle to find a new home following the partition of India in 1947. In this video work, I am using archival material, old photographs, dinners, and period music to emulate conversations surrounding the loss of her childhood home using collective remembrance as an ethnographic research tool. With a reflective perspective at its heart, “Ghar” will follow a series of unfiltered and unscripted talks between a grandson and a Nani often lighthearted but also poignant at times, whilst oral evidence of British violence in contemporary Pakistan and India runs like a red thread throughout the storyline.
Maastricht,The Netherlands (6217)
50.8514° N, 5.6910° E