Untitled Table #1, 2012
Mixed-Media Performative Installation
Afghanistan Human Rights Project, Commission
Kabul, Afghanistan
More than decade after the US invasion of Afghanistan, an illegal invasion justified in part on the need to promote and defend the human rights of Afghan people, Afghanistan is still struggling to establish these rights in a concrete way. The piece speaks to the complexities of this endeavor in Afghanistan, where the defenders and violators of human rights compete in a ping-pong match over the country’s future. Through a survey of 50 people, the 4 most important rights and 4 most serious rights violations were extracted and carved into the paddles while the surveyed individuals play the role of spectators over the competition.
Mixed-Media Performative Installation
Afghanistan Human Rights Project, Commission
Kabul, Afghanistan
More than decade after the US invasion of Afghanistan, an illegal invasion justified in part on the need to promote and defend the human rights of Afghan people, Afghanistan is still struggling to establish these rights in a concrete way. The piece speaks to the complexities of this endeavor in Afghanistan, where the defenders and violators of human rights compete in a ping-pong match over the country’s future. Through a survey of 50 people, the 4 most important rights and 4 most serious rights violations were extracted and carved into the paddles while the surveyed individuals play the role of spectators over the competition.
What Histories Lay Beneath Our Feet?, 2012
Site-Specific Installation
1st Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Commission
Ft. Kochi, India
Rooted in my own familial story of migration from India to Afghanistan, and its imagined return, What Histories Lay Beneath Our Feet? uses archaeological excavation (itself a highly politicised and interpretive discipline), documentation, oral history, and imagination as forms of resistance against attempts in Afghanistan and elsewhere to impose certain historical narratives upon us, and to explore history and politics (both colonial and contemporary) as a way to reimagine the possibilities of the past, the condition of the present, and therefore the potentialities of the future.
Untitled Bench #1, 2012
Site-Specific Installation
McLeod Ganj, Bhagsu Park, Behind the Dalai Lama's Temple
Dharamshala, India
Untitled Bench #1 builds upon the existing use of the space and, rather than representing a conclusion to the knowledge gained and information shared during the residency, serves as a prelude to asking more questions and furthering engaged conversations about Tibet and its future. The object then becomes merely the instigator, and the artwork lies in the discussions, dialogues, and debates that will take place between people on site. In this way the artwork becomes not only truly collaborative, but continues recreating itself over time.
Resolution, 2012
Site-Specific Installation
dOCUMENTA(13), Commission
Weinburg Bunker
Kassel, Germany
(Photo Credits - Nils Klinger)
Resolution is a sound & print installation conceived for the Bunker im Weinberg, Kassel. It presents a short story written in the vein of a fairy tale (Kassel having been the hometown of the Brothers Grimm) that draws upon both German and Afghan folk stories and the cultural understandings rooted within them, referencing the history of Kassel and Kabul, and confronting the current political relationship between Germany and Afghanistan. The viewer/listener’s sensory experience is drawn into and intertwined with the Bunker im Weinberg, a loaded, suspended, ambiguously de-temporalized, and dislocated place that in its use during WWII could hold up to 10,000 inhabitants throughout its tunnels.
