Within my interdisciplinary visual art practice, I engage in discourses surrounding migration, postcoloniality, and political content in South Asian diasporic popular culture. My current projects trace patriarchy grounded in nationalist movements through a feminist analysis of the history of urban infrastructure and city-building in Pakistan. The trauma within bureaucratic drawn borders onto land are dislocated into nuanced representations of community building within the digital- no less violent. Speculative fiction, collage, and the digital interface are conceptual and formal tools within my work; sources I derive from are familial analog photographic archives, stock imagery, and state propaganda within Urdu publications on poetry and tourism. These extracted materials are then collapsed and reimagined within the digital interface to create alternative timescapes. With humor, lush visuality, and disjointed perspectives my writings, drawings, animations, and new media works seek to make visible the outlines of cultural alienation, patriarchy, and systematic violence.

My current project “Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Long Live Trans-Pakistan)” consists of a lecture performance, in process animation, VR installation, and interactive web environment  that outlines the intersections of military- state surveillance, global capital networks, gentrification, and grandeur urban internationalism, of a corrupt housing corporation, Bahria Town, based in Pakistan. This global enterprise houses miniature and large-scale reproductions of a Sphinx, Eiffel Tower, and Taj Mahal, etc is investigated through the facade of a revitalized tourism company, “Trans-Pakistan”, once owned and operated by my maternal uncle. The multilayered narrative and visual material overlap tourism, familial archives, metaphors of the body, and proposals of technological piracy as urban design. The project speculates within augmented and virtual technologies to alternative forms of occupation in urban imaginaries of surveilled simulacra.