
I am a design educator & an interdisciplinary creative practitioner, researcher and writer, living and working in Pakistan & UK. I tend to explore and enjoy writing about the Inter/Intra/Cross and Transdisciplinary connections and practices across art, design and architecture. I regularly write about arts, culture and travel in the newspapers.
My undertaking at Arte Morbida is to investigate all those interdisciplinary experiments being done in the past and happening in the present, loosely from the global south— southeast Asia in particular. Visual artists have worked with textile/fibre art to expound and rationalise their ideas for a long time. Architects have attempted many long-lasting and ephemeral structures using fabrics. Communication designers to fashion, product, and textile designers have been exchanging a lot of ideation and narratives to stretch their quest for the utmost experimentation, some plausible, others implausible—for now. My retentive quest for achieving sustainability through this critical field of study, decolonisation of the museum artefacts and archival materials through research and the role of the textiles & fibre art in the design fiction—but not limited to. Visual & Material cultures work conjointly; therefore, history, appraisal and criticism must happen simultaneously. I also learn about the concerns from the academic practices at the higher education level, as this lateral conjures up more robust and synchronous apprehensions—also spark some excellent ideation for the constant innovation in the centuries-old wrap & weft of the fabric.
I hold a BFA in Fine Arts (2000) and an MA in Multimedia Arts (2003) from the National College of Arts, Lahore. I went to the UK to do my MA in Communication Design from Kingston University London (2006) after a few years of experience as an Associate Producer at GEO TV Lahore. I am currently Head of the Visual Communication Design Department at the Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts & Design of Beaconhouse National University (BNU), Lahore. I have worked as a communication designer & a multimedia consultant with clienteles internationally from the USA, the UK to Pakistan and beyond, like Sophia Learning, Autograph ABP, Hulton Archives (Getty Images), DFID UK, UNESCO, Linge Roset, Eugene Dodd Typographics (EDT), Woolpack Inn, Hamptons of London, Aconflag Group Europe and Salt’n’Pepper Restaurants (PAK/UK) to name a few. A critical book design and art direction project to date is a monograph “& She Wandered,” centred on the acclaimed academic & visual artist Farida Batool’s art practices, published in Mar 2020. I have done web-design projects for world-renowned Artists / Educators from southeast Asia; Rashid Rana is one of them, and Risham Hosain Syed, respectively. I have also led a complete branding/design process and execution of an enthusiastically futurist / anti-consumerist brand named “Minus Glocal” by Rashid Rana, which was executed at the Manchester International Festival, UK, in July 2021.
I have accomplished a four-month-long incubation cycle with some enthusiastic South Asian archivists and curators online. It has been designed and run by “Curating for Culture” India. I have been the co-founder of a research consortium, “The Unboxed Lab”, which was founded by academics from Razia Hasan School of Architecture and Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts and Design at Beaconhouse National University, that creates, promotes, and highlights a discourse on the interstices between architecture, communication, textiles, fashion, art, and design. The Unboxed Lab launched its first-ever event in collaboration with the prestigious international research organisation, Architecture, Media, Politics, and Society (AMPS) and the famous publishing house Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. I have exhibited my mixed-media work extensively in various group shows in Pakistan and Abroad.