Reshaping Power

Reshaping Power Series is an ongoing inquiry that centers on the intersection of political violence, memory, identity, and spatial belonging, focusing on the lived experiences of marginalized communities in urban Karachi. Philosophically, the work is grounded in Martin Heidegger’s concept of throwness; the notion that individuals are involuntarily cast into particular historical and social contexts. This is critically expanded through Slavoj Žižek’s interrogation of Heidegger’s political limitations, bringing attention to the ethical complexities of memory and identity shaped under systemic duress.
The conceptual framework also draws on Michel de Certeau’s theory of strategies and tactics, examining how marginalized communities navigate and subtly resist dominant power structures in their everyday lives. Through a deeply personal and participatory lens, the series functions as a form of counter-mapping, reclaiming erased narratives and contested spaces through memory, visual storytelling, and artistic intervention.

The material language of the work, corrugated sheets, laces, and fabric, emerges from this same recursive process: these materials are not illustrations applied after the fact, but the outcome of sustained research into the built and lived textures of these communities, just as that research is, in turn, driven and deepened by the material exploration itself. Each informs and unsettles the other, so that material and inquiry evolve together rather than one simply serving the other