Bio
Asad Ali Zulfiqar (b. 1995, Karachi) is exploring peoples' histories and their irrefutable influence on identity, public and private lives through participatory practices. They work with text, image, sound, installation, performance and pedagogy. They hold spaces where unspoken truths emerge, are felt, witnessed and held with love; participants draw insights from them into their striving for liberation in a climate of disconnection.
With multiple international grant-awards under their belt, their works have been showcased in Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Singapore, Australia, France, Norway, Switzerland, the US and the UK. They hold a BA in Communication & Design from the Habib University, and are a 200-hour certified yoga teacher.
As a third-generation resident of Karachi, they honor the city's Indigenous peoples — the Sindhi and Baloch — past and present, who have lived, known, and cared for this region over centuries of reverence and resistance. They bear witness to the historical and ongoing state violence inflicted upon these communities: their ancestral farmlands in Gadap and the Indus Delta, dispossessed and degraded, their truths scrubbed from the earth; the Arabian Sea coastline, militarised and commercialised, tightening around the lives and livelihoods of Indigenous fisherfolk, robbing the entire city off its connection to the sea. They hear the ghosts of Karachi’s rivers – Lyari, Malir and countless other aquatic landscapes made to disappear under extractivist regimes. Haq maujood.
