metropolis m

‘I was born and raised in Pakistan, and went to the US to study film. When I graduated I went to live in New York for a bit, but was really disappointed by the world I encountered, with its prevalent systems of capitalism and exploitation. I sometimes joke that college did not prepare me for the world, but for the possibility to radically dream of alternatives. I have also spent time in Havana, Cuba and Dakar. All these encounters with different lands, histories, geographies, oceans, languages and more allowed me to think more expansively. Most of my work comes from Pakistan, but in order to process the work, it has helped to look at it from a distance. In 2021, I moved to Maastricht to be a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academy. After the residency, it occurred to me that most of the work invitations I was receiving were in Europe. Another thing that shifted during the pandemic was my thinking about space. I was drawn to immersive spaces that were not just on the screen. And for my newer body of work, I realized I needed to be present on-site to install them. So it wasn’t a very hard decision to stay in the Netherlands. I moved to Amsterdam in 2022, and have been working between Pakistan and Amsterdam ever since.’

It continues to be present. Every time I go to the forest, I see further degradation, more trash. The air often smells of trash-burning fires. What we as humans are destroying, and the scale at which we set fire to the world, is enormous. Sometimes I ask myself: Why do I keep making work that is going to continuously keep breaking my heart? Yet, there’s also a capacity for regrowth. I don’t want to overly romanticize the resilience of nature, but these sites are magical. They transport me somewhere else. It’s beautiful to sit on the forest ground and be surrounded by ferns, with the shifting light, the wind, and the birds. I could just sit there for a long time, being rejuvenated, nourished and healed. I keep going back to the word “magical” because it really feels like I enter into a world that is not possible in the urban spaces I live in. I feel this wild love and tenderness for the forest. There is joy when I commune with nature.’

‘I think capitalism and exploitation destroy the possibility of love. Historically, looking at the relationship between most humans and nature, it’s been one of destruction as opposed to one of nurturing and stewardship. One of the early guiding forces towards How to Love a Tree were questions like: How does a forest love? How do trees love and care for one another in a forest where they’re not domesticated, pruned, told what to do? Then I introduced myself and began to ask: How can I learn from that? There’s so much to learn, but we as humans have been incredibly arrogant as we forsake all these vast sources of knowledge and experiential wisdom. Love and witnessing have become a really important part of my practice. Love is a way to repair, to heal and rebuild. The world around me has become harsher. The conditions of livability are deteriorating for so many human and more-than-human life forms. To counter this darkness, to find the possibility of some hope, I turn to love as a way of coming together and reading histories that have been repressed, so that we can imagine other futures than the one that we’re blindly rushing towards.’

‘In 2019, I attended an artist residency in the forest. It was raining a lot, and I would be sitting inside and looking out into the rain. Hours would go by, but I was never bored. Time began to change. I felt it on my body. I had this question: if this tree is 500 years old, how can I share time and presence with that tree? Can we cross temporalities? It occurred to me that it was not just the temporality of the long lives of trees. It was also that of the cicadas which mate and die in the space of two weeks, and flowers which bloom, wither and become seeds again. I wanted to understand time better, to really pause and think about its layers. How do I measure time other than using a clock or my telephone? How do I read seasons without looking at the calendar? Animals sense time and danger and read the signs of a storm coming. People who live by the sea learn to read the sea. Those who live next to a forest learn to read the forest. My challenge and fascination was: How do I learn?’

‘I don’t believe that the past is ever really the past. Our immediate past, the past of colonial empires, and so many different kinds of past – they could all continue to act upon and inform the present moment. In my work and in my thinking, I like to collapse time. I really don’t think it’s wise or even possible to separate the past and the present. It’s all one continuum. When I made the project proposal, I was thinking about Hoorn as one of the VOC chapters, a harbour from which a lot of colonial ships set sail to the Southern hemisphere, towards Indonesia and the Americas. For this project I’d like to project the skies from the Southern hemisphere in Hoorn, which is in the Northern hemisphere. All early maritime navigation relied upon the skies. I imagine that in all the colonial greed and desire to conquer and expand, people just saw land and did not look at the skies beyond navigation. In a way, the project is a chance for redemption – I’m asking people to pay attention to the skies and be humbled by them. The restoration of lost dignity during colonization, I want that to be part of the conversation.’

‘I remember a talk that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave, titled The Danger of a Single Story, which really resonated with me. I am also influenced by Sadiya Hartman’s work on “critical fabulation”, which draws attention to all the witnessing that never made into the official narrative.When you’re told a simplified version of something, it often compresses into just one perspective – the victor’s perspective. I grew up with contested stories about the partition of India and Pakistan. There was a colonial narrative, an Indian narrative, a Pakistani narrative, and so on. These varying accounts had little in common; even the “facts” were disputed. I was taught to be skeptical and to ask questions quite early on in life. The more questions I asked, the more it helped me to arrive at further questions and build a richer understanding.’

‘In some ways, I’m betting on it. I filmed All that Perishes over nine months on multiple trips, and over time the workers opened up to me, sharing their lives, their truths. I realized that documenting and witnessing is not a passive act. The workers were transferring to me their life stories. It’s as if they were saying: “We have shared these with you, now it’s your turn to take this and to share our testimonials with others.” A testimonial is a powerful thing to receive. I recall an Islamic teaching that if you witness an injustice and stay silent about it, you become complicit in the act(s) of injustice. So you have to speak up and share your witnessing in public. You cannot let it die with you. That’s where I think witnessing has this radical possibility for community, for change, and also for the love to free ourselves, collectively.’