Bio

Omer Wasim (1988) & Saira Sheikh (1975 - 2017) are visual artists who practice together, and cast a retrospective glance at the present to radically examine and mine contemporary art practices, and recent, albeit superficial, interest of the global west in their region; and also to reconfigure, re-articulate, and disrupt existing and complacent modes of artistic engagement and production. Wasim continues to execute projects that were jointly conceived and the duo was invited to participate in the Dhaka Art Summit 2018. Omer Wasim has a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture and an MA in Critical Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore, Maryland. He has been teaching and practicing in Pakistan, since 2014, and is currently a faculty in the Liberal Arts Programme at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Saira Sheikh had a BFA from the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, Punjab, and an EdM from Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, New York. She had been teaching and practicing in Karachi, Pakistan, since 2013, and was Associate Professor and Head of the Liberal Arts Programme at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi.

Artist Statement | Cultivating Wastelands

Artists' Statement Given where we are situated in time and place, unnerved by our implicit and explicit experiences and collaborating with uncertainty and volatility, we attempt to understand the present by casting a retrospective glance; treating the present as past helps defy immediacy, allowing for conceptual and critical distance from contemporary realities, both corporeal and incorporeal, systems, and rhetoric. Our aim is to debunk and unpack (self-)colonising modes of knowledge construction and circulation by embracing contradictions as central to making and thinking—since any attempt to redact contradiction compromises possibility and criticality. Using a retrospective glance, we narrate through visuals, excavated in an unspecified future, from data buried and lost in digital and material archives in and around Karachi, to reorient the gaze toward the current epoch. Our projects include fictional and factual readings of collected and constructed images and objects; in order to witness, challenge, and disrupt unitary or binary readings of human ecologies, consumption, value, and labour. The data symbolises, enacts, and enables these contradictions, intensifying the very anxieties that it aims to subjugate, and in being isolated from its context becomes a relic of neoliberalism, hinting at modes—new and old—of constructing knowledge and histories. We, as artists, are not mere participatory observers, or witnesses, but are also responsible for generating, circulating, and perpetuating these hegemonic systems of constructing knowledge and histories. Recognising that it would be fallacious to assume otherwise, we acknowledge our complicity and agency, make them an integral part of our work, while simultaneously making ourselves accountable. Stemming from these frameworks, we investigate the global contemporary, the recent, albeit superficial, interest of the global west in this region, and art practices that pander to western as well as local ideas about living and making work in, from, and about Pakistan. We work together and in lieu of depoliticising or aestheticising politics, attempt to politicise aesthetics, and radically (“from Latin radix, radic-‘root’”) reconfigure, re-articulate, and disrupt existing and complacent modes of critical engagement and artistic production.
Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh

Studies for a Failed Monument

Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh Drawing connections between certain subsets of data in our archives, we were able to illustrate the nation-state’s fallacious belief that it could continuously mine the land and the ocean, and impose its whim and will even further on all ecosystems, without any repercussions. In situating this particular data set, we uncovered plans for another coastline sector. These plans show that this sector, if built, would have been an epitome of their misplaced desires; they envisioned land that would keep creeping into the water, constantly adding to the square footage of constructible land, accruing in value; and to commemorate it, a monument at the very centre, celebrating rabid construction and development, aiming to further partition the land. Plans for the monument present a vertical common prefabricated concrete form, often used by the subspecies as a skeleton to support the roof over their heads. It is ironic that the subspecies from whom this form was coopted and subsequently aggrandised, would never have been allowed to enter the water-landmass, or even see it, since this waterlandmass was built in a range of visibility solely reserved for the palace owners of that epoch. The commission collapsed and the monument remained hypothetical, existing merely as images and studies on paper and as material samples. In its failure to materialise, it becomes, for us now, a failure of that entire epoch. Its absence becomes a monument to the failure of institutions that would have enabled its very formation, and to the collapse of hegemony. It also makes visible the resistance to amnesia enabled and imposed by the nation-state. Further, it bears witness to multifarious erasures of collective memories, challenging dominant “narratives with the ‘discourse of other’”, the “loss of master narratives”, lands systematically lost, and other forms of division and partition. In its notbecoming, it became to the things that it was obliterating a monument, instead of a monument to the things it was celebrating. The images and material residues reveal that there were dichotomous dimensions inherent in the urban environs of that time, helping us illustrate a dialogue, between the built and non-built, and instances of how the land was moved, divided, and dislocated. Aspirations writ large upon the land are reflective of excessive desires to construct and possess, albeit simultaneously destroying and dispossessing existing ecologies—strengthening structures of power, hegemony, and violence through partitioning and demarcating the land. It is important to note that these desires were not only individual or singular, but were a reflection of complex systems that were central to the neoliberal order, which was “aempathetic” and malignant. The human species—oblivious to the violence and entropy, however muted, subtle, and implicit, that came with partitioning and demarcating spaces—perpetuated these systems ceaselessly, therefore contributing to entropy, hastening their own eventual destruction and decay. This excess led to inevitable collapse.

Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh
Selection from Studies for a Failed Monument, 2017
Archival inkjet prints
11 inches x 24 ½ inches
Edition 4/5 + 2 APs
Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh
Selection from Studies for a Failed Monument, 2017
14 inches x 20 inches
Edition 4/5 + 2 APs
Archival inkjet prints