My practice explores how colonial histories shape land, borders, and collective memory. Using speculative cartography, fabricated archaeological objects, and para-fictional archives, I reimagine geopolitical divisions, trade routes, and climate crisis—revealing their connections to displacement, identity, and erasure. By subverting traditional map-making and archival conventions, I challenge institutional narratives, blending materiality and fiction to propose alternative forms of resistance.

As a DIY enthusiast, I’m drawn to craft-based techniques, using them to interrogate labor, ecology, and the politics of preservation. Whether through painting, sculpture, or installation, I aim to create spaces where the past and present collide, inviting viewers to question the stories we inherit and those we might reclaim. 

 

Concept Note/ Artist Statement:

My practice draws from the universal experience of shifting places, finding new homes, and adjusting and absorbing into new spaces. More significant issues of migration, nationalism, citizenship, land ownership, climate change, and non-script language narratives intertwine to address my artistic research.

My relocation from Pakistan to India in 2009 increased my fascination with maps, borders, city limits, and everything related to geographical locations. I find it surprising that borders can create and divide places at the same time. Since then, I have been creating memorabilia through objects, photographs, and memories directed towards counter-mapping and alternative archiving.

I use para-fiction and speculative archiving to interrogate colonial documents—maps, trade records, and photographs—creating counter-narratives that challenge institutional archives and museological practices. At the heart of this work is the climate crisis, which I approach as an unfolding consequence of colonial capitalism. By reimagining historical data on land division, resource extraction, and borders, I trace how these systems shape present-day displacement, identity, and ecological rupture.

My fictional archives merge past and present, using invented cartographies and documents to expose the ties between colonial violence, climate collapse, and forced migration. The work asks: How do archival absences perpetuate erasure? And what futures emerge when we reclaim the archive as a site of resistance?