Tag: karachi

The Untold Edition — Tree Planting Drive with Akhuwat Foundation

I had been researching a lot of public art projects and they inspired me to recreate the idea that public art can break walls. Literally. So the first thing I did when I landed in Karachi was go and buy bricks. Yup. 500 red bricks which we then painted a pale terracotta and stenciled with ‘The Untold Edition” name. The idea was to build a wall out of them along with 500 plants and to invite people to pick up a brick, take home a plant and plant it with the brick placed next to it. Symbolically, and literally, public …

The Untold Edition — BTS

This project has consumed the last few months of my creative energy. So much work has gone into conceptualizing and executing it that it is difficult for me to even pen it down. I am literally answering emails and in meetings at all hours trying to set things up with collaborators and coordinate with team members and participants, approving and creating graphics, getting stuff printed and god knows what else. It has literally been so much work that last week I reached the point where I asked myself the question we often ask in the middle of a painting that …

Embracing the storyteller

You know what can be terrifying sometimes? Realizing that you have so many interests, passions and ambitions that you end up feeling totally unfocused. Four years ago I picked art and I have the consistency disease. I literally stick by what I choose through thick or thin. So while the fear was always there, so was art. I wouldn’t give it up, even in the moments where I felt I was a fake, pretending to be an artist. But you know what that did? That sole, blinders-on kind of focus made me exclude some of my other interests as important. …

Interactive digital installation — first attempt

It is my personal belief that art requires an audience. If art means something to somebody then I believe it has fulfilled its purpose. It may inspire, repel or cause controversy but it will evoke something in someone. Put like that, one could say art may be incomplete without an audience? What if we view that thought literally? Interactive digital installations seek to make the audience part of the art itself. They unfold like a performance. They create connections. I always imagine interacting with a digital installation as taking part in a dream. Something unreal is taking place and the …

The Untold Edition — Phases of planning part 1

I’ve always known that community work is important to me. I think growing up with a dad like mine cultivated that in me. He’s an eye surgeon and his hobby is to host eye camps in the rural areas of Pakistan where people suffer from curable diseases like cataract and spend their whole lives blind. I watched him perform 200 cataract operations a day for nothing and then spend the weekend sleeping on the roofs of clay houses. He enjoyed every moment of it. I saw the looks on those faces when their bandages were unwrapped and they blinked in …