Bio
Asad Ali Zulfiqar (b. 1995, Karachi) is a new media artist with an interdisciplinary practice that spans text, image, sound, installation, performance, and pedagogy, exploring ways of finding compassion as a response to the prevailing political climate. Their work revolves around belonging (or not belonging), to our communities, lineages, built and natural environments, languages, mazhab and khud/a. Their writing praxes seek to uphold the transient nature of identity and open up time.
With multiple international grant-awards under their belt, their works have been showcased in Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, Myanmar, the US and the UK. They hold a BA in Communication & Design from the Habib University, and are a 200-hour certified yoga teacher.
Settled in 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.
