Bio

Living in the UAE while completing my Bachelor’s meant that I was in the thick of diasporic questions, constantly finding myself in migrant spaces from South and Southeast Asia and searching for the presence of feelings and textures from back home.

These inquiries led to the creation of my experimental short, thoughts in transit and culminated in the production of Tohfa and Anna.

The latter two films both look at displacement and the alienation of the migrant amidst the cosmopolitan fantasies of Abu Dhabi. In Tohfa, I was interested in exploring these questions through the adolescent gaze and the complexity of motherhood in a foreign land. Anna looks at the migrant question from a completely different context: what happens when returning home is no longer an option?

During this time, I also discovered the joy of co-creating with a community through my work with the Mawaheb Art Studio.

My research interest in bodies of water first emerged when I came across the theories of Astrida Neimanis. For most people from Karachi, the sea is the focal point of our imaginations, the edge of land and water that is an escape from the abrasiveness of the metropolitan. But in a city so blissfully forgetful of itself, water and its many body(s) have always been wrought with tension.

We, humans, settle around water just as water settles within us. It inundates us, engulfs us and confronts us, just as we exploit it, contain it and dismember it.

From the breeze that leaves the sea at night to its vandalized rivers; the fragile systems of state to the dwindling fish in the ocean; the lost legacies of indigenous fishing to the forgotten families of fishermen, I became fascinated with the inadequacy Karachi holds in its coexistence with water.

This has been the foundation of my recent work, since I have moved back to Karachi. In this, the sea also became a way of thinking across the Indo-Pak border. While the physical border itself looms large in our national imagination, I am interested in how one can destabilize this notion of the border in all its non-cartographic forms; in the tembers of our tongues, the shades of our soil and the waves of our seas.

At the core of my research is also a desire to not be tied down to a form, and to chase an idea and see where it’s taking the process. Straddling between the walls of fiction and non-fiction, analogue and digital, the visual and the written, my work is grounded in experimentation in all its endless possibilities.