From Dhoongri to Karachi (2025)

Multimedia Installation

Sustainability Hub
Maastricht, NL
October 2025

From Dhoongri to Karachi

_{is a multimedia installation consisting of textile pieces, a few pieces from my grandmother's and excerpts from my film, Nani, Karachi and I (2024). Made from fragile, woven sheets of rice paper, images of my favorite moments spent with my nani are printed.

This is a continuation of my ongoing artistic research project Ghar: frames of recollected memories (Fall 2023), in which I chose to seek visual answers to my questions of statelessness, questions of my contemporary Pakistani identity and an investigation into a longing of a home long-lost, by focusing on my grandmother who came to Karachi from Mumbai as a refugee after the 1947 Partition of the Indian motherland.

I, in my effort to make sense of a convoluted ethnic heritage in contemporary Pakistan, try to reassess the role of an archive, not as a fixed site of preservation, but as something fluid, fragile, activated, sometimes misremembered. The notion of “Ghar” (home) appears in multiple forms: as an actual site, a sonic memory, a lost photograph, a disappeared recipe and a VHS tape. Home becomes an unstable ground I return to through my artistic research, taking the form of this multimedia work.}