Accumulated Indifference
Medium: Performance
Year: 2026
The performance reflects on Karachi’s long history of violence and bloodshed, examining how prolonged exposure to such realities has gradually desensitized the city’s inhabitants. As Pakistan’s largest metropolis and economic hub, Karachi has experienced repeated cycles of political unrest, ethnic conflict, targeted killings, and violence along religious and ideological lines since the 1980s.
Through this work, the artist examines how violence becomes normalized and consumed, watched, read, photographed, turned into reels, circulated on social media, and then quickly moved past. In relation to the “Aaj aur Kal” theme, the performance explores how the violence of the past (Kal) continuously seeps into the present (Aaj), shaping collective memory and conditioning how the future is imagined.
Accumulated Indifference foregrounds the persistence of historical trauma while asking whether collective awareness and empathy can function as forms of resistance and, possibly, renewal.
Cartographies of Absence
Medium: Performance/ Digital video.
Year: 2024
Cartographies of Absence is a critical exploration of how the body, in the grip of capitalist routines and systemic productivity, becomes both a site of movement and a site of erasure. This project investigates how daily labor, deadlines, and digital hyperconnectivity fragment our sense of presence, severing us from moments of intimacy, rest, and relational care.
At its core, the work addresses the quiet tragedy of forgetting, particularly the way we become estranged from our own families; most notably our parents, who grow old while we stay busy "building lives." The body in this work is not only a vessel of lived experience but also a witness to what is lost in the name of efficiency. As we navigate our choreographed routines, the marks we leave are not always of presence, but of absence of time that should have been spent, of memories that could have been made.
Using the body as both map and marker, this piece reflects on how every moment spent with a parent becomes a trace, a sensation, a gesture, a memory, that resists commodification. Yet under the weight of capitalist structures, even these moments are often deferred or ignored. The work critiques how we internalize productivity so deeply that it rewires our ability to feel, pause, and remember, turning human connection into collateral damage.
Nowhere to Walk
Medium: 1-Hour Video Performance
Location: Karachi, Pakistan
Year: 2024
Nowhere to Walk is a one-hour video performance that confronts the systematic erasure of pedestrian infrastructure in Karachi. The artist moves through his neighborhood, but the camera remains static; an unflinching witness to the absence. What unfolds is not a journey, but a quiet indictment: not a single uninterrupted footpath; in some places, none at all.
The work resists spectacle. It refuses to aestheticize decay or romanticize resilience. Instead, it documents the spatial violence of a city that no longer accommodates the act of walking. Through repetition and duration, the piece reveals how everyday movement; once a fundamental expression of belonging is now obstructed by encroachment, neglect, and the architecture of indifference.
Nowhere to Walk is a critique of urban planning as a tool of exclusion. It exposes the slow cancellation of pedestrian life in favor of car-centric development, informal commerce, and privatized space. This is not merely about mobility, it is about dignity, access, and the right to occupy the city without resistance.
The Other Side of the Screen
Medium: Stop-Motion Video
Duration: 30 seconds.
Year: 2024
The Other Side of the Screen is a stop-motion video that interrogates the omnipresence of mobile devices as both extensions of the self and instruments of surveillance. Conceived from the perspective of the device itself, the video blurs the boundary between object and organism, positioning the phone not as a passive tool but as an animated, sentient presence, an entity that watches, listens, learns.
This work reframes technology not merely as a medium, but as a living actor within our social, political, and psychological environments. In an era where surveillance capitalism operates through intimacy and design, The Other Side of the Screen reveals the gaze that emanates from the device; quiet, constant, and embedded in the mundane.
Through the tactile, handcrafted nature of stop-motion; a technique that resists the slickness of digital perfection, the video underscores the paradox of using an analogue process to critique the digital condition. It challenges the viewer to confront their complicity in the reciprocal loop of observation: we hold the screen, but it holds us too.
