Bio Working as an architect, a tutor and a visual artist based in Lahore, she addresses themes such as urban segregation and development, and recently religious symbolism/aesthetics and the city. For the last four years her work has focused on documenting and depicting the lives of women devotees and the various oral narratives of a female saint that are shared with in her shrine as it undergoes major architectural renovation.
Artist Statement | Knowledge of the Ancients
A Lamentation:
Pride of the city, the dome is a spectacle.
Easily seen from afar, shimmering golden in the sun.
Made with a thousand tiles- a demure green in the night.
But the beloved ancient mother tree,
With her crooked body underneath
whose leaves filled empty jholian
is no more.
They said;
she could no longer embrace the cosmos.
the wind no longer ruffled her leaves,
the sun no longer danced through her bony branches
making enchanting shadows on her lover’s bodies
the rain brought rust to her roots,
from the scaffolding hulking above
Children’s piss going down the new drain,
bleeding into her heavenly feet
Her body, now a carcass?
With not even a shadow
a waste of precious real estate?
Just as her daman disappeared
So did she?
must be the metal foundations going deeper than her roots!
must be her exposed secrets, dug up from inside her womb!
must be the forced lifting of the veil!
must be the cruel ways of the world!
must be the blood of children, of loved ones displaced, disappeared, tortured..
must be the pain she felt in her earthen body,
Everywhere she was touched…
…It must be the dimming of the light in my heart,
I struggle to keep it lit,
in this wretched world without you -
I become a mother again