Lecture-performance | Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Long Live Trans-Pakistan) by Umber Majeed

Sunday, October 27th, 2019 | 4:00pm at Sursock Museum

Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Long Live Trans-Pakistan) is a lecture performance that outlines the intersections of military- state surveillance, global capital networks, and grandeur urban internationalism, of a corrupt housing corporation, Bahria Town, based in Pakistan. This global enterprise houses miniature and large scale reproductions of a Sphinx, Eiffel Tower, and Taj Mahal, etc is investigated through the facade of a revitalized tourism company, “Trans-Pakistan”, once owned and operated by the artist’s maternal uncle. The multilayered narrative and visual material overlap tourism, familial archives, metaphors of the body, and proposals of technological piracy as urban design. The project speculates within augmented and virtual technologies to alternative forms of occupation in urban imaginaries of surveilled simulacra; contesting the corporate imaginary entering the home.

Umber Majeed is a multidisciplinary visual artist. Her work engages with familial archives to explore specifics of Pakistani state and urban infrastructure through a feminist lens. Majeed has shown in venues across Pakistan, North America, and Europe. She participated in Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program 2016-17 in Beirut, and is the recipient of fellowships including Refiguring Feminist Futures – Web Residency, Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM, Germany (2018); and The Digital Earth, Hivos, the Netherlands (2018-19). Majeed lives and works in New York, USA and Lahore, Pakistan.

This event is part of Home Works 8: A Forum on Cultural Practices.

Image is courtesy of the artist.