This body of work explores various features of Karachi’s urban landscape through formalist abstraction. I have a deep appreciation for minimalist abstraction, and I’m particularly intrigued by the concepts of form, shape, composition, and colour. The abstract patterns in my paintings draw inspiration from the window grills and portals found in the unconventional homes of Karachi. My exploration of these elements began during quarantine, a time when I started to reflect on the forms around me and question why they appear the way they do.

Colour plays a crucial role in examining the inside-outside relationship of windows, which act as portals for light. The selection of colours in my work is deeply influenced by light, in conjunction with Josef Albers’ colour theory. The way colour is perceived is shaped by numerous factors, including the surrounding context, lighting conditions, and even what we observe before and after a colour.

My work stems from connections with the homes that I have inhabited. Growing up, my family and I lived in a two-bedroom basement apartment in North Nazimabad—an old construction prone to weekly flooding. Together, we envisioned a dream home. Despite challenges, we tirelessly pursued the dream of owning a larger house, driven not only by the need for more space but also by the desire for a better lifestyle and social status. However, after moving into the new house we realised this dream home was a very different reality from the imagined one.

Now, my work is inspired by Safoora Chowrangi, the area I moved to eight years ago. What once looked like a peaceful, green dreamland has drastically changed into a chaotic construction zone, with cranes towering everywhere.

In my work, I create puzzle pieces that sometimes connect to build larger forms. I work with MDF, vinyl sticker paper and other construction materials, focusing on building facades. These puzzle pieces represent the fragmented journey of building a dream home, capturing the challenges of rapid urbanisation and external pressures, like interference from land mafia.

Through a series of drawings, I explore the redundancy and repetition of our education system that marginalizes students with different learning abilities, by classifying them as failures due to an inability to fit a perceived perfect order. The walls, as a commanding canvas, are intentional metaphors of how in my formative years the existing education system instilled and exerted control through a conventional form of learning that left no space for inclusivity. And while from afar, this may seem to produce an ideal student, in reality a child’s imagination and curiosity are stifled. I am inspired by construction lines from copybooks used in primary schools which from distance, seem precise and drawn with almost mechanical acuity but upon closer inspection the imperfections become visible. Through my drawings playing with the interplay of lines I question how our education system and its’ intentions can be perceived.

In this part of the world, from the moment you are born, things are preconceived for you to live by. You are told what to wear, what to say and what to study. Who’s to say what is right? Or how should one live their life? How can you tell a person what to do or say? And how easily can our society pressure us into thinking things that we might not agree with? My father once told me that the only thing I could do freely was to drag a pencil on paper. My work is hence, a series of pencil drawings that I’ve tried to let out my frustration through about the hypocrisy I see around me everyday. I used advertisements as a reference to address my anger since it is one of the major sources of forced ideals we have to interact with since we are born.

The work comments on the negligence and toxic environment present in early childhood educational institutions in Pakistan. The trauma that we experience in our early years carry with us throughout our lives, and revisiting these physical spaces and reliving these memories, though traumatizing, is also a form of therapy, and helps process what was felt so strongly as a child and in my case, the child who was left behind.

Schools often stifle all individuality and creativity, expecting children to act the same, something that heavily affected me as a child when I looked around the classroom and realized there was no one I could relate to. Teachers often fail to acknowledge the history behind every child, and there is immense pressure to become this perfect image of the perfect student. My work talks about the pressure felt by children to be the best they can in class, an emotion I felt strongly and one that is collectively shared amongst people.

My approach includes photographs, videos and audios. After struggling and trying several methods to portray my idea, I decided to revisit the place which triggered these negative thoughts and physically capture the spaces I wanted to talk about. The work was mostly based on field research, and the movie ‘Pink Floyd – The Wall,’ also informed a few of my works.

As artists, we tend to seek information and stories on the lives of other people and use them to our liking. My work explores the nature and reaction of an artist towards the stories of atrocities our city faces on a daily basis, to which we have all become so accustomed to hearing. It begins as a personal journey, as I question my interaction with such events through newspaper articles covering these events daily which I normally skim through apathetically. As I struggled to read these articles that talk of death and anguish with empathy, I found myself in a state of meaningless despair. I found myself wanting to express the contrast between the nature of the article with the state of mind of the artist towards it. Using visuals such as floral plants, motifs and elements of the newspaper, I attempted to articulate these ideas through my work.

Thinking about my personal experiences of escape through food and video games, I developed my research to focus on the absence of healthy entertainment venues in Karachi. Aside from its culinary experiences, Karachi now has few options for public entertainment. Cinemas, once abundant have dwindled significantly, amusement parks, aquariums, and zoos have deteriorated or have been repurposed, often for commercial uses through illegal means.

My work explores the decline of entertainment and leisure spaces in Karachi, focusing on the destruction and deterioration of once iconic and significant places that offered vital escapes for the public. These spaces, once significant to the public, are now largely dysfunctional or lost. This lack of public spaces for entertainment contributes to a sense of monotony in daily life.

Through 2D animation, I portray the transformation brought by the destruction and neglect of these once-vital spaces, emphasising the importance of preserving them as essential outlets for public relief.

Whose Mark is it Anyway? The role of urban decay in my city, Karachi, has profoundly influenced my artistic research. My site-specific work examines layers of marks, smears, seepage, and urban decay in both public and private spaces. These visuals reflect neglect, abandonment, and the psychological state of society—symptoms of the environment we inhabit. While attempts have been made to erase or repair these marks, my research highlights them as characters of the urban landscape, illustrating how they take form over time and continue to spread like a societal disease. Using mediums such as photography, video, ceramics, and print, I delve into these layers, treating the city itself as my research site. Through my work, I aim to highlight the overlooked narratives of urban spaces, provoking thought on the city’s identity and fostering a deeper awareness of our shared environment.

Enjoy working with repetition and patterns because they give me a sense of control and predictability. Just the idea of a pattern being constructed from the same motif inspires me. Simultaneously, I have also been observing and documenting the barricades which become obstructions and set-patterns in the city. Growing up in Karachi, I have always felt that my movement is restricted because of these objects, for example open gutter holes, broken roads and hurdles that randomly exist on the roads. Those obstacles have a dominant nature as they force the citizens to change their movement, or make any move by considering their placements. By taking these obstacles as a subject matter, I turn them into a modified and simplified motifs extracting out of the images and work on digital patterns to reflect my urge of creating a balanced, ordered and organized version of the city.