تم اپنی کرنی کر گزرو (Tum apni karni kar guzro)—Faiz

Struggles in Art and Radical Becoming

2025

“Tum apni karni” illuminates global-local, geo-political traumas absorbed by land and its inhabitants through the lens of land displacement in the regional US and Gilgit-Baltistan. It highlights these issues as part of larger patterns of colonial violence, land dispossession, and environmental injustice. This work is enmeshed with nature: with its ability to effect healing, recognizing the connective tissue binding us to the earth. It speaks to inter-connectedness: of humans with the earth; with humans to each other, and to life. It reunites fragmented parts of land(scape) in a process of healing from displacement, both internal and physical. Destruction transmutes into landscape of renewed hope. “Tum apni karni” pays tribute to the resilience of people whose spirit refuses to be crushed, who resurrect a path through wreckage, cultivating new futures.

Guest Curator: Pyaari Azaadi (formerly Jaishri Abichandani)
Curatorial Director: Asad Hayee

Gallery 1 & 2 Installations: Unearthing Stories From The Core series

Unearthing Stories From The Core

Unearthing Stories From the Core, rests at the intersection of land ownership, land displacement, climate disaster, eco-therapy, and personal narrative. Unearthing Stories From the Core, project examines land displacement in marginalized regions in the US and Northern Pakistan. The land(scape) is a repository concealing and preserving our history. Gilgit-Baltistan is home to the longest glaciers outside polar regions, and Pakistan’s most ethnically diverse region. It suffers some of the greatest global damage from climate disaster. This work asks: how are we altered by the environment we have altered? How might we relate to land outside colonial, capitalist modes of living? A future of belonging, without territorial possession, living in mutual care. As a larger project, Unearthing Stories From the Core considers our relationship with the earth, recognizing the connective tissue binding us.

Gallery 1Installations: Fractured Alchemy  

Ink pen drawings on vellum with gold leaf on Arches watercolor paper. 67 x 45 in. each.

Ink pen drawings on vellum with gold leaf on Arches watercolor paper.
Top left, 73 x 44 in., top right 43 x 46 in.

In Fractured Alchemy, fragments of arboreal remnants are scarcely distinguishable from porous rocks: nature’s patterns linking them across matter, serving as a metaphor for the underlying oneness of creation. The work is about rebuilding a future from the wreckages of the past, taking broken things or nature’s detritus—parts of tree limbs, driftwood, even my own drawings—into new realities and new worlds that transcend the destruction. It embraces the alchemy of transformation. Gold—a traditional quest for alchemists—considers the process of making the ordinary sacred.

Gallery 1Installations: Parwaz (soar)

Mixed media: landscape collages of photos of Passu glacier in Gilgit-Baltistan printed with archival inks and mounted on gold leaf on canvas,80 x 95 in.

Mixed media: landscape collages of digitally manipulated photos of Passu Cones in Gilgit-Baltistan printed with gold leaf.
First row: left, 27 x 26 in.; middle (photos for collages printed with archival inks) 60 x 50 in.; right, 43 x 48 in.
Second row: left (detail); middle, 36 x 30 in.; right 37 x 71 in.
Third row: middle (bird seen on the left), 41 x 38 in.

The birds are abstractions: collaged photos of glaciers in Gilgit-Baltistan’s (N. Pakistan) majestic and ecologically endangered landscapes. The landscape transmutes into soaring birds, enshrined in gold. The birds’ ascent suggests migration and narratives of belonging. Belonging rooted in shared histories, embedded in landscapes across time and space, cultural, terrestrial, celestial. Belonging for as a process of continually engaging. A connection with the earth. With the energy and rhythms of creation—our place in the cosmos as part of greater consciousness. A process of reunion of fragmented parts of oneself, and communities. A process of metamorphosis and transformation, in particular of something destructive into something beautiful.

Gallery 1 Installations: Alchemy of Disappearance

Sculptural collages of mountains and landscape of Gilgit-Baltistan transmute into personal inner psychic landscape inviting reflection and meditation. These landscapes are of majestic beauty, and of extinction and erasure—of lives and ecosystems, of women’s craft and labor. Landscape of renewed hope, cultivating new futures.

Gallery1 Installations: Fractured Cosmos

Fractured Cosmos
Ink pen drawing on vellum with gold leaf, 36 x 68 in.

Forms that recur throughout nature are combined with Islamic geometric patterns to expose the inherent unity that underlies existence. Patterns that form the building blocks of the natural world—from the human body to the cosmos, from the neural and cosmic web networks to patterns in arboreal forms—illuminates our interconnectedness with all creation.

Gallery1: Black Holes

Mixed media: landscape collages of digitally manipulated photos of rocks at Eagles Nest in Gilgit-Baltistan, soil, acrylic paint.
108 x 36 x 24 in.

This hanging sculpture is crafted from images of hollowed rocks from the Eagles Nest in Hunza, Gilgit-Baltistan. The blackened void of the rocks, eroded over time evoke a landscape of erasure—a poignant reflection on both the personal and the physical, the inner and the outer. Recomposed into a suspended form, the rocks rise above the soil, embodying a process of metamorphosis and transformation. They soar like ethereal spirits, transcending their origins, inviting viewers to contemplate loss and creation. The ephemeral sculpture challenges our perceptions of permanence and impermanence, illuminating the beauty that can emerge from the past remnants.

Gallery 1 Installations: Our Shadows, Our Wings

Mixed media: collages of digitally manipulated photos of Karakoram mountains and rocks along the Passu glacier hike in Gilgit-Baltistan printed with archival inks, MDF fiberboard, acrylic paint.
Left panel: 48 x 90 in.
Right panel: 48 x 120 in.

Gallery 1 Installations: Spine of Sorrow, Alchemy of Hope

Mixed media: collages of photos of Karakoram mountains in Gilgit-Baltistan printed with archival inks, gold leaf on canvas, acrylic paint. 69 x 36 in.

Gallery 1 Installations: Landscape Resistance

Mixed media: collages of landscapes in Gilgit-Baltistan, digitally manipulated landscapes of Gilgit-Baltistan printed on Fine Art Litho paper with archival inks, acrylic paint.
Left Panel: 97 x 120 in.
Right Panel: 97 x 90 in.

Gallery 2 Installations: Acts of Disappearance

Acts of Disappearance is a reckoning with landscapes of displacement and erasure. A tribute to women’s labor and resilience. An honoring of the earth as a source of our sustenance: spiritual, material, embodied. An offering; a song of survival, rising, and becoming. Acts of Disappearance illustrates how marginalized communities bear a disproportionate brunt of climate disaster. The 2010 landslide buried Attabad village, formed the Attabad Lake, and led to a loss of life-ways — including traditional art forms such as embroidered “Hunza” caps. Now populated by resorts as the area’s biggest tourist attraction, the displaced Attabad people were forgotten, here evoked by Hunza caps. The caps speak to loss, to global connection, to the alchemy of hope. Most poignantly, the “disappearance” refers to the disappearing ecological system in the face of climate disaster, disappearances of activists who protest for social justice. Disappearance of indigenous bodies and of labor – often women’s – especially within the most economically impoverished regions, globally.

Installation: hand embroidered caps from Hunza, soil. 158 x 176 in.

Hand embroidered Hunza caps are composed in the shape of the Attabad Lake and placed on the map of Gilgit Baltistan carved out in soil sourced locally.

Mixed media: Site-specific installation of hand embroidered Hunza caps in Gilgit-Baltistan. Ink jet printing with archival inks on Fine Art Litho paper; 36 x 44 in.

Gallery 2.5 Installations: Prayer Rugs: Call of the Earth

Mixed media: digitally manipulated photos of landscaped of Gilgit-Baltistan, collage, gold leaf, mounted on board.
Left Panel: 96 x 180 in., each unit 24 x 36 in. with a total of 20 pieces.
Right Panel: 96 x 216 in., each unit 24 x 36 in. with a total of 24 pieces

Prayer Rugs is a call to protest environmental destruction. Collaged images of ecologically threatened land are set against a gold ground, highlighting the transmutation of the everyday earthen to the precious. A call to prayer to the earth. For mutual care and healing. Prayer Rugs invite transformation through connection with the earth, threading human and nonhuman energies with the land’s spiritual vitality.

Gallery 3 Installation: The American Dream

Installation: canvas tent, hand-crafted fabric flowers, printed fabric, digital collage of archival images of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, battery candles, soil, bricks, cellophane, spot lights, (fresh marigold flowers to be added).
Tent, 144 x 144 x 132 in.
Inner brick enclosure around the tent, 168 x 168 x168 in.

The American Dream

The American Dream was originally designed for the centennial memorial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre as part of the Greenwood Art Project. The American Dream offered a tribute to the loss and resilience of victims of violence, while transfiguring the loss and destruction of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre into a flowering memorial. It focuses on a “refugee” tent, designed to evoke those used by the African Americans made homeless after their once prosperous neighborhood was demolished by a white mob. It also stands as a larger symbol of state-sponsored violence around the world. The imagery of the tent’s interior contrasts sharply with its plain exterior, reflecting the nature of trauma as it is passed on through generations. Yet, the light within suggests a sense of hope and healing that can only be found through acknowledgement and honor. The American Dream offered a solemn memorial to the weight and tragedy of what was lost, as well as a message of hope, renewal, and solidarity. 

The tent speaks across audiences—from the encampments of protesters in the US protesting Israel’s genocide, to the Tent Massacre in Gaza, to unhoused people, to the victims of disaster and violence, of massacres, of environmental catastrophes. It recalls the tents that housed the displaced people of the Attabad landslide in Gilgit-Baltistan. They lived in tents for 8 years, forgotten and abandoned.

Likewise, the marigold flowers carry multiple meanings: they recall the bomb explosions that rained fiery destruction on people’s homes. Yet the blossoms also suggest rebirth in the wake of tragedy.

Credits:
The American Dream was part of the Greenwood Art Project, an initiative of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre Centennial Commission. Full list of sponsors and contributors on the webpage: https://www.sarahahmad.com/greenwood-art-project
Archival photos of the Tulsa Race Massacre contributed by the Tulsa Historical Society & Museum. 

Credits:

Project Facilitators in Pakistan for Unearthing Stories From The Core:
Salima Hashmi, Professor Emeritus, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore
Mirza Hussain, Project Coordinator Eco-friendly Bags Project, KADO
Aqeela Bano, CEO, Ciqam Green Solutions Pvt, Ltd.
Project Facilitator and Project Manager in Gilgit-Baltistan:
Zaheera Siraj, Compliants Officer, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Gilgit-Baltistan

Project Contributors in Pakistan:
Zainab Anees
Shakila Haider

Studio Assistants:
Farhan Ali, James Ratterre, Marium Rana

Sponsors:

This project is made with funding and support from:
Tulsa Artist Fellowship,Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA and Laila Nusrat, Chairperson, Bali Memorial Trust, Lahore, Pakistan

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