Within my interdisciplinary art practice, I use video and digital interfaces to collapse multiple sources from family archives, Internet stock imagery, and Urdu publications on poetry and tourism. The humor, lush visuality, and disjointed narratives in my writing, drawings, collages, and animations explore the Pakistani state, and urban and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens.
“Long Live Trans-Pakistan (Trans-Pakistan Zindabad),” is a digital research project that outlines intersections of military and state surveillance, global capital networks, gentrification, and urban internationalism in Bahria Town, a corrupt housing corporation in Pakistan. The project combines performance, animation, virtual reality experience, and interactive web environments.
Bahria Town, a global enterprise, has miniature and large-scale replicas of a Sphinx, Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal, and more. In my project, this global enterprise is investigated through the facade of a digitally-revitalized tourism company, “Trans-Pakistan”—once owned and operated by my maternal uncle. The multi-layered narratives and visuals overlap tourism, family archives, metaphors of the body, and technological piracy proposals as urban design. The contrast between small-scale garden sculptures created by local artisans and commissioned by Bahria Town and the large-scale Western reproductions of monuments and corporate modernity, accentuate the socio-economic tensions of those within and outside of the housing community.
“Long Live Trans-Pakistan (Trans-Pakistan Zindabad),” is inspired by South Asian informal networks, low-cost media, and pirate practices (as defined by Indian media theorist, Ravi Sundaram, in Pirate Modernity.) The piracy of audio and video Bollywood cassettes, an illegitimate means of consumption, became a culture within and onto itself. This activated the personalized media experience and allowed individuals to reclaim public space and protest culture from the state-owned corporate sector. I also draw from Eyal Weizman’s Roundabout Revolutions to rethink how digital tools in architectural features like roundabouts can be reclaimed by the working class and those that have been gentrified out. In the context of Bahria Town, a housing corporation accused and charged with land-grabbing by the state, roundabouts are containers for functioning tourist sites and semi-public spaces for non-residents (labourers). In Pakistan, the architecture and urban planning of gated housing communities trace South Asian diasporic economy and capital as the force of gentrification.
