Editor: Maham Khurshid

Editorial Board:

Sumbul Khan 
Maham Khurshid 
Faiza Mushtaq

Editor: Maham Khurshid

Editorial Board:

Sumbul Khan 
Maham Khurshid 
Faiza Mushtaq

Kafka in the woods 

Zehra Nabi

Zehra Nabi is a writer based in Karachi. She earned her MFA from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where she also taught creative writing and served as Assistant Editor at The Hopkins Review. Her non-fiction and fiction writings have appeared in Dawn, Newsline, Herald, The Express Tribune, Subtropics, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of two All Pakistan Newspapers Society awards for her investigative features published in Newsline. She presently teaches courses on literature, film studies, and academic writing at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, and the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS), Karachi.

The Potato, the Mark, and the Body 

Usman Ansari

Usman Ansari has an M.Arch from Tulane University, New Orleans. He has practised in the fields of urban planning, architecture, and interior design at Gensler and at Meinhardt in San Francisco, and at TAQ Associates Pvt. Ltd. in Karachi. Usman is avidly involved in the visual and performing arts as an art director, scriptwriter, and painter. His art has been featured in the international web series Churails and he has produced commissioned work for private collectors and corporate clients. His first solo show titled Unsung opened in Karachi in 2021. He currently heads the Department of Interior Design at IVS.

The Self Within the Collective 

Sarah Ahmed and Arooj Aurangzeb

Sarah Ahmed is an Assistant Professor of Health Sciences and Women’s and Gender Studies at Providence College, Providence. Her research lies at the intersection of global health, gender and development, and has been published in Gender and Society, PLOSOne, and SSMPopulation Health. Her current book project examines the structural and cultural dimensions of an internationally funded healthcare initiative — the Global Polio Eradication initiative — through the everyday lives of female health workers in South Punjab, Pakistan.

Arooj Aurangzeb is a socialist political organiser and a Punjabi street theatre artist based in Lahore. She is a strong advocate for the restoration of student unions in Pakistan. Arooj’s interests include pedagogy of alternate learning, anthropology of revolution, performative politics, and culture of protest. She is currently working as a Research Assistant on a project called ‘Partition of Identity’.

Mapping Sacred Games

Priya Pinjani Perwani

Priya Pinjani is an architect, designer, and urban thinker. She has an MSc in Design and Urban Ecologies from Parsons, The New School of Design, New York, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and a B.Arch from IVS. Her key interests are the politics of space, right to the city, critical urbanism, and an expanded field of design. She has contributed to projects exhibited at the Pakistan Pavilion at the Dubai Expo 2020; the Pavilion of Pakistan at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale; the National History Museum, Lahore; and in the web series Churails. 132 She has previously taught at Habib University, Karachi, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at IVS.

Narrative Images: Women’s Selfies, History, and Storytelling 

Noor Butt

Noor Butt is an artist, writer, and educator. She has an MA in History of Art from Birkbeck College, University of London, London, and a BFA from IVS. Her research interests and creative practice focus on archival history, gender, and image-making in the digital age. Her professional portfolio includes projects with Koel Gallery, O Art Space, ArtNow Pakistan, the Karachi Biennale Trust, Vasl Artists’ Association, and the Karachi Collective. Currently, she holds a hybrid position at IVS, where she is Programme Officer in the Graduate Programme and teaches art history courses in the Liberal Arts Programme.

Spirit of the Sarangi 

Zehra Jabeen Shah

Zehra Jabeen Shah is a poet, writer, and oral historian based in Karachi. For the last four years, she has been learning to play the sarangi, under the mentorship of Gul Muhammad of Hoshiyarpur gharana. She is currently working on a project that traces the sound of the folk sarangi in interior Sindh and Tharparkar, with a focus on women in music. She is also a faculty member at Habib University, Karachi, where she teaches literature and writing. You can find her on Twitter/Instagram: @zehrajabeenshah

Shared Spaces

Shamama Hasany

Shamama Hasany is a multidisciplinary artist based in Karachi. She received her BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore. Her practice explores themes of intimacy, memory, and the self through the mediums of painting, drawing, photography, and text. She has exhibited her work in Karachi and is currently pursuing her M.Phil in Art and Design at IVS.

Volume: 04 | Risk

Editor: Faiza Mushtaq 

Editorial Board:                                                                                                                  

Asad Alvi
Sumbul Khan
Mishal Khattak
Faiza Mushtaq
Seher Naveed
Sadia Salim

Editorial Note 

Dreaming Futures: The Risks and Rewards of South Asian Futurisms

Nudrat Kamal 

Nudrat Kamal is Lecturer of Comparative Literature at the Institute of Business Administration,

Karachi. She has an MA in Comparative Literature from Stony Brook University, New York, which she attended as a Fulbright scholar. Her research focuses on literature exploring the South Asian Partition, as well as in the intersections of gender, postcolonial theory, and science fiction and fantasy. Most recently, her chapter “The Postcolonial Cyborg in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome” was published in Palgrave Macmillan’s Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction. She writes on literature, film and television, and culture for various publications such as Dawn, Newsline and The Express Tribune.

Karachi is Hard to Love

Gulraiz Khan

Gulraiz Khan is a design researcher and strategist, working at the intersection of design, urbanism and finance. He currently heads Customer Experience & Design at United Bank Ltd. He is also a Teaching Lead for IDEO U. Previously, he taught design at Habib University and co-founded the playground, Habib's center for transdisciplinarity, design and innovation. He received his MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from The New School's Parsons School of Design.

Richard Pryor in Black and Blue

Palvashay Sethi

Palvashay Sethi is a student, writer, and teacher. Her fiction has appeared in minorliterature[s], Barrelhouse, The Aleph Review, Severine, Queen Mob’s Tea House, and FishFood Magazine. She has a Masters in Literature and Modernity from the University of Edinburgh, and is completing an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. You can find her on Twitter as @Palvashits.

Imagined Utopias: Art as a Social Practice

Niyati Dave and Manjiri Dube of Khoj

Niyati Dave is a writer and curator based in New Delhi. She is currently Curator and Program Manager at Khoj International Artists’ Association where she leads Does the Blue Sky Lie? Testimonies of Air’s Toxicities, a three year project that explores the troubled ecology of Delhi’s air, along with working on other projects about ecology and the climate crisis. She studied Art History and Museum Studies at Smith College. Before joining Khoj, she worked at the Economic and Political Weekly, India’s leading academic journal, and as the Communications Officer at the Centre for Policy Research for a project conducting collaborative research on urban informality.

Manjiri Dube is a part of the Curatorial & Programs Team at Khoj International Artists’ Association and is leading Peripheries & Crossovers. At Khoj she has also executed the Food Residency Ed. (III), the Curatorial Intensive South Asia 2021, and managed We Are Ours: A Collection of Manifestos for the Instant (Himali Singh Soin), Deep Time (Rohini Devasher), Residual (Anpu Varkey) and Word. Sound. Power. Manjiri has a Masters in International Relations from the University of Warwick, and has worked with the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative in New Delhi, NDTV Good Times in Mumbai, Here&Now365 in London and with artist Subodh Gupta in Gurgaon.

Expedition 2: Barrages and the Fragmentation of the River Indus

Pak Khawateen Painting Club

The Pak Khawateen Painting Club was formed by invitation in 2020 to create a new commission at the Lahore Biennale 02. It is an off-shoot of the Murree Museum Artist Residency, an artist-run initiative to examine postcolonial conditions and the decay of the British Raj-era hill station, Murree. The collective currently comprises of four members:

Saulat Ajmal is an artist, educator and independent curator. She is a Lecturer at the National College of Arts, Lahore and contributes writings on art for various publications.

Amna Hashmi is a visual artist and art educationist, currently teaching as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Design at COMSATS University, Islamabad.

Saba Khan is a visual artist and Assistant Professor at the National College of Arts, Lahore. She founded the Murree Museum Artist Residency and the Pak Khawateen Painting Club.

Zohreen Murtaza is a Lecturer in the Cultural Studies Department at the National College of Arts, Lahore. She is a visual artist and writer.

Bakar Kahani

Babar Sheikh

Babar Sheikh is a filmmaker, multimedia artist, musician and educator. His film narratives are centered around urbanism and its effects on everyday human interaction. Babar graduated from the Department of Communication Design at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS) in 1999 and is currently enrolled in the M.Phil. in Art and Design program at IVS. He is an Assistant Professor of Media Sciences at SZABIST.

Eik Yaad Jo Kisi Ko Yaad Nahin

Syed Safdar Ali

Syed Safdar Ali received a BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2014. He has exhibited his work widely in Pakistan and has been the recipient of the ADA Awards 2019, Mansion Artist Residency 2018, ISL and Canvas Gallery Artist Residency 2017, Pioneer Cement and Canvas Gallery Artist Residency 2017, and Vasl Taaza Tareen International Artists Residency 2014. His art practice explores human beings’ inability to identify with the structures created by them, specifically the contradiction between simultaneous distrust of social structures and desire to fit into them. Safdar currently teaches at the Shaheed Allah Buksh Soomro University of Art, Design and Heritages, Jamshoro, and is completing his M.Phil. in Art and Design at IVS.