Multimedia Installation
Sustainability Hub
Maastricht, NL
October 2025
                


From ढूंगरी to Karachi


Installed across the room like an open Suitcase,  From Dhoongri to Karachi (2025) unfolds through hanging textile scrolls, three video screens, scattered heirlooms, and images that carry traces of migration. Printed on handmade rice paper, these images show tender gestures of my grandmother as she visits parts of Karachi where she first settled as a refugee.

Excerpts from my film Nani, Karachi and I (2024) appear within the installation, weaving moving image and still image into one rhythm. Central to the work is an old suitcase, releasing two VHS tapes from 2001, my nani’s old passport, photographs and more.

This project continues my ongoing research into the politics of memory, migration and national amnesia, expanding on Ghar: frames of recollected memories (2023). Through my grandmother’s story - her journey from Mumbai to Karachi after 1947, I think about “Ghar-گھر” (home) as something unstable: a shifting constellation of places, smells, textures, and half-remembered stories.

In an effort to make sense of my convoluted ethnic heritage in contemporary Pakistan, I 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. 


Materials: digital video (looped), three monitors, rice paper prints, stitched textiles scrolls, found suitcase, wooden crates, archival material (1951-2001).
Dimensions: 6.5 × 5.8 m.
Year: 2025








Photo by Nikita Dyatlov






Photos by Halar Soomro