About the Artist:
Qasim Ali Hussain (b. 1996) is a Pakistani interdisciplinary artist and performer based in Brooklyn, New York. His practice spans from painting and drawing, to installation and video, to dance and performance. Hussain’s practice is rooted in the idea of transformation through language, repetition and rhythm. Whether it’s the shadow pushed through cycles of movement to transcend itself, or text becoming bodily texture, he returns to rhythm as a methodology of becoming. Repetition allows small movements of light, language, or form to build into something transformative. The work oscillates between movement and stillness, figuration and abstraction, sensation and meaning.
Graduating with a BFA in painting from Lahore’s National College of Arts and an MFA from Parsons School of Design, Hussain has exhibited in numerous gallery shows across Pakistan and New York . Hussain is also a dancer and choreographer and has worked closely with the Lahore dance company ‘The Colony’ and collaborated with major Pakistani artists such as Ali Sethi. His dance endeavours have led him to perform and choreograph (solo and ensembles) at esteemed institutions such as the Alhamra Arts Council in Lahore and National Academy of Performing Arts, Karachi and in New York City.
Artist Statement:
Language is central to my work. I treat text as body—alive, breathing, pulsing. The curves of Urdu calligraphy act as visual voices, sonic environments, and emotional frequencies. These recurring marks—painted, projected, performed—form rhythmic fields that offer a visual language for queer joy, intimacy, and resilience. Through repetition and text, I seek to trace a sensual politics of escape, beauty, and becoming—a refusal of containment, and an embrace of the endless, rhythmic pulse of being.
This piece emerged from that moment—an exploration of the existential nature of love, its fleetingness, and the weight of desire amplified by the current culture of performance and sexualization in the queer world. One night in a Brooklyn club, Haddaway’s What Is Love reverberated through the room—a 90s Eurodance anthem echoing both euphoria and solitude. I danced with abandon, yet felt suspended between bodies, between longing and loss. In that moment, music became more than background—it became memory, language, and home. It carried the contradictions of joy and alienation that define how I experience identity and intimacy.
The question lingered: What is love? It is both a lyric and a haunting—an echo that follows me across languages, spaces, and histories. As a queer Pakistani navigating the conditions of love and belonging in New York, the question becomes not only about romantic connection but also about cultural inheritance, friendship, care, and the longing for recognition. In my work, this question transforms into a visual and sonic refrain, repeated in Urdu script until it becomes rhythm, vibration, frequency. The work manifests as a dense field of handwritten Urdu text layered in undulating lines of gold, red, and green pigment and the repetition of text produces a surface that hovers between legibility and abstraction. Through this repetition, I treat What is love? as both question and choreography, an embodied search for meaning, where sound and language collapse into one another. The work holds this tension: love as absence and excess, as memory and motion, as an endless pulse that resists definition.
