What does it mean to embrace an art practice centered on always becoming ? For me this means recognizing that – in this – art is like the world around us: always in flux. Of transformation; of evolution. Of fact and poetry. Detritus from the streets transmutes into altars to resilience and healing. Enmeshed within sculptural collage of drawing, photos, these found items find a home alongside geologic and botanic materials from biologically threatened lands in my native Pakistan and adopted home in the U.S. Personal inner psychic landscape juxtaposed with shared physical and cultural invites reckoning and reconciliation, reflection and meditation. These landscapes are of majestic beauty, and of extinction and erasure—of lives & life-ways, ecosystems, of women’s craft & labor. Landscape of renewed hope, cultivating new futures. My title, “Our shadows are our wings” is drawn from a poem by Kaveh Bassiri.
In Urdu, the same word is used for ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ (کل kul). Time fundamentally differs from the Eurocentric ‘temporal imaginary’ as linear, tautological and empirical. In contrast, kul reveals a temporal sensibility that is fluid: future and past are coalesced, overlayed and etched into each other, forming new potential worlds and temporal imaginaries. As time is not measured in a linear way but formed in the fluid space between—between people, between human and nonhuman energies—time becomes not individual but shared. As an immigrant to the US, I too live profoundly in-between.
I make visible multilayered temporalities through collage of past and present works; multiple works are happening within the amalgamation, indefinitely evolving. By collaging old drawings with new works, I create a larger meta narrative. Multilinear time acknowledges trauma and the destruction of lands and transforms them into new landscapes. My futurity is that of hope, of extensions of souls. As my practice is about rebuilding a future from the wreckages of the past, the process entails taking broken things—even my own drawings—into new realities and new worlds that transcend the destruction. I seek to manifest transformation: a speculative future where there are multilinear ways of engaging with time, where all ways of living may operate in non-dominant and non-exploitative methods simultaneously coexist. I connect through the landscape, threading human and nonhuman energies with the land’s spiritual energy, free of anthropocentric hierarchies.
My latest work engages the notion of always becoming: the ever-dynamic process of creation. Personally, as an artist; as a people, and as the earth seeks continually to heal itself. I confront environmental racism, writ large and small. From issues of access to green space, to large-scale climate catastrophe and its disproportionate burden on already marginalized populations globally. For me, immersive art may act a conduit to make tangible transformative encounters with the earth. My installations offer aesthetic sanctuaries, underscoring our (dis)connection with the earth.
This NARS installation, is not the same each day, if you visit. By continually responding to my environment, writ large and writ small, I invite a similar spontaneous response from my visitors. “Our shadows are our wings” is an offering: a sanctuary to deep presence, populated with altars to the patterns and rhythms of life becoming around us daily.
As a larger project, Unearthing Stories From The Core considers our enmeshment with the earth, asking: how are we altered by the environment we have altered? Land(scape) is a repository concealing and preserving our history. Recognizing the connective tissue binding us to the earth as also literary, it invites recall of our stories: multiple parables within the larger narrative, building upon itself. A connection with the rhythms of creation. An unceasing process of healing. Of reuniting fragmented parts of oneself.
“Our shadows are our wings” is an offering: a sanctuary to deep presence,
populated with altars to the patterns and rhythms of life always becoming around us daily.
Freshkills & Governors Island, NY photos (part of studio installation)
We are intermeshed with the subterranean realities on which we stand.
“Matter itself is always already entangled with the Other… in one's bones, belly, heart. In one's nucleus, in one's past & future.” — Karan Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 2006
What does healing look like when brought to nature itself? Substantial parts of New York rest on filled land: the refuse of our past. Most recently, the largest public park spaces are built atop landfills as we seek to repurpose that which we’ve cast away but are unable to disappear. Freshkills park rests on a garbage dump, offering one of the most potent transfigurations imaginable: the reviled castoff detritus of everyday modern life, into precious urban greenspace. One day, the traces of this manufacture will become another layer in the Earth’s crust.
Land(scape) is a repository—concealing and preserving our history and our future. The history of soil layers is that of micro- and macro histories. How are we altered by the environment we have altered? New York offers an exceptionally rich development on my work examining the earth as a repository for trauma and history, as well as a source for healing. On land-fill—the residue of past human lives—the resonant terrestrial quality is activated and amplified.
What energy does this anthropocentric form of 'soil' bring as different from a lithosphere of rock and mineral? NYC becomes a site where the entanglement of matter is activated with the energy of its own past. My work speaks to inter-connectedness: of humans with the earth; with humans to each other, and to life; of the local & the global; of the micro & the cosmic.
What does healing look like when brought to nature itself? Pattern governs the order of creation, how do we replicate it when brought to mend the ecosystems we’ve destroyed?
Freshkills Park, Staten Island, NYC (installation)
Visit with private tour of portions still in planning or under construction. Freshkills Park sits on Fresh Kills Landfill which was the largest landfill in the world by 1955 and the largest landfill in the US until it closed in 2001. It is the largest park to be developed in NY in over 100 years, at three times the size of Central Park.
Governors Island, NYC
How are we altered by the environment we have altered? More than half of Governors Island is built on a landfill, 100 of its 172 acres, the entire south side. The lush Hills on the South with views of the Statue of Liberty and the NY Harbor sit on mounds of landfill, soil dug to build part of NY’s subway system. This “land reclamation” has led to sinking of Governors Island at a rate of 3.4 mm (plus or minus 0.8 millimeters) per year, one of the fastest sinking rates of NY locations.
Governors Island has also historically been the site of hazardous waste. From petroleum spills in the groundwater, to subsurface contamination in buildings and the soil. Arriving at the island by ferry and departing from it, one sees the spectacular views of the NY harbor. But as I walk the island, art and nature are mixed with relics of the past, crumbling structures, hints of the lush oasis betraying glimpses of structures keeping the soil in place, debris on the coast, fenced areas with fragments of history scattered around. Mounds of shells fenced in for recycling, views of the Statue of Liberty bearing witness. An island sinking would be far from anyone’s mind in this hub of arts, recreation, leisure, and always nature’s resilience and beauty.
Unit-Antler, mixed media, 2024 (part of studio installation)
Crafted entirely from detritus and wood collected from NYC. An interactive sculptural contrivance. A psychic, futuristic landscape portal, a telepoter. A memory object, for reminding and forgetting. Preserving our history and future. Connecting humans, landscape, and its residuals.
Becoming
Shadow wings entail an offering —
at its centre
embedded in a sanctuary of presence
altars of patterns
rhythms of becoming
from a shadow to a tangible, spiritual being
rooted and winged
in deep subterranean layers
connective tissues binding it to the earth
elevating through celestial layers and beyond
into an infinite entity
of matter
energy
and spirit
a sanctuary
of reckoning and refuge
resurrection,
reconciliation
meditation,
play
struggle
and hope
a process of finding one’s path
of becoming
processes of healing
in reuniting fragmented part
from the micro to the cosmic
local-global
humans,
with one another
nonhumans and spirits
world,
with the earth
a community — a poetic state
its boundaries unfixed
landscapes of majestic beauty
of extinction and erasure—
of lives, life paths, ecosystems,
and women’s craft and labor
transmuted into
landscapes
of renewed hope
of cultivating new futures
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