The two artworks created almost a decade apart address the relationship of an individual and that of the collective with the city they inhabit … namely, Karachi.

Karachi to its inhabitant often appears to be a paradox. The fabric of the city is a complex weave of various overlapping spheres of life that engulf you from all sides and yet there is so much beneath the surface that we neither see nor know.

With the Karachi maps I strive to blend the physical reality of the city with the experiential, creating a narrative mapping of the hybrid space between them. Borrowing from the conventions of cartography, this mapping
challenges a purely static notion of public space to promote a temporal logic of the city that reflects its fluctuating character. Each map responds to a different aspect of living in this megalopolis, triggered by an individual’s route through the “city”, highlighting the relationship between the physical urban landscape and the invisible infrastructures of the city.

 

On a collective level the ‘city’ seems to twist from the inner to the outer and back again like the Mobius strip, which gives an illusion of double surface and double edge but has only one surface and one edge, intertwined endlessly.