This week we welcome multidisciplinary visual artist Umber Majeed.
Fotocopy.net (2020), Screenshot of Interactive desktop web environment
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Her writing, animation and new media work engages with familial archives to explore Pakistani state, urban and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens. Majeed has shown in venues across Pakistan, North America and Europe. In October 2018, Majeed had her debut solo exhibition, ‘In the Name of Hypersurface of the Present’ at Rubber Factory, New York. In July 2021, Majeed will have a solo presentation at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virgina.
Artist Statement:
“Within my interdisciplinary visual art practice, I engage in discourses surrounding migration, postcoloniality and political content in South Asian diasporic popular culture. My current projects trace patriarchy grounded in nationalist movements through a feminist analysis of the history of urban infrastructure and city-building in Pakistan. The trauma within bureaucratic drawn borders onto land are dislocated into nuanced representations of community building within the digital- no less violent.
Fotocopy.net (2020), Screenshot of Interactive desktop web environment
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Speculative fiction, collage, and the digital interface are conceptual and formal tools within my work; sources I derive from are familial analog photographic archives, stock imagery, and state propaganda within Urdu publications on poetry and tourism. These extracted materials are then collapsed and reimagined within the digital interface to create alternative timescapes. With humor, lush visuality and disjointed perspectives my writings, drawings, animations and new media works seek to make visible the outlines of cultural alienation, patriarchy and systematic violence.
My current project “Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Long Live Trans-Pakistan)” consists of a lecture performance, in process animation, VR installation and interactive web environment that outlines the intersections of military- state surveillance, global capital networks, gentrification and grandeur urban internationalism of a corrupt housing corporation, Bahria Town, based in Pakistan.”
View more of Majeed’s work on her website and Instagram page.
