Art Archives and Urban Imagination: How art students are collecting, recording and observing continuity and change

On May 25th, 2025 the URA gave an online presentation to law students part of the SOCH Fellowship based in India. “SOCH is a collective effort to document the everyday operations and conditions of our legal systems. The data collected from site studies is made open to students, organisations, lawyers, judges, policymakers, researchers, and all interested individuals. The fellowship contributes to this larger effort.”

The URA’s presentation focused on how art students over the years at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture zoom in on key sites in their research and produce work about these locations over the course of a few months. Through select examples of work, which reflected the materials and markets of Karachi, the dialogue included an overall synopsis of why Karachi is interesting for art students and how there are multiple approaches to extracting site-specific information in a large South Asian city such as Karachi.  

During the talk, SOCH fellows shared their own research and exchanged notes on their hometowns/cities with the URA.