Reclamation Proclamation
In the beginning, there was movement. Not the kind that traces itself back to a single origin, but the kind that sprawls outward in all directions—across time, land, and language. The America in which I believe is neither static nor singular. It is an act of exchange—a continuous transfer of breath, thought, and color. It is not just the pursuit of happiness but the pursuit of dialogue, of shifting and reshaping, of layering the old with the new, like frescoes upon frescoes in a country still painting its own mural.
I have lived between worlds—Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, New York City. I have pressed my palms against the walls of ancient mosques and traced the grime of subway doors. I have heard poetry in the reverberations of the Azan at dawn and in the jazz spilling onto Harlem’s sidewalks at midnight. And in each of these spaces, I have carried with me the question: What does it mean to be American?
For me, the answer has never been found in a passport or a pledge, but in the movement of ideas. America is a country born not just from revolution but from conversation, where the parchment of its founding documents crackled with the friction of disagreement. This is a land where contradiction is an inheritance—where abolitionists and slaveholders debated the soul of a nation, where laborers and industrialists clashed over the promise of prosperity, where artists and entrepreneurs continue to reshape the landscape of possibility.
My work, both visual and written, is an act of dialogue. I borrow from the frescoes of past artists and the calligraphy of my ancestors, but I am equally shaped by the raw, unfiltered language of contemporary artists—consisting of urgent strokes, coded messages, and the refusal to be confined by the gaze of others. I see history not as a fixed account but as a contested space, where narratives of power and displacement collide. I layer stories within stories as a palimpsest of voices, each pressing against the next.
Reclamation Proclamation reasserts America as a country of perpetual reinvention—a place where art, identity, and resistance remain in public conversation. The exhibition unfolds within the house as a living narrative, each room a meditation on movement, exchange, and transformation.
Title: All Heart
A blindfolded figure swings at a heart-shaped piñata, turning quest into entertainment. The artist perches in a frame, caught between witness and participant. Yellow stick figures hang from a rope, evoking lives suspended or ignored. Faded political signs tell of broken promises and ideological fatigue. The bright palette and playful forms contrast with the underlying tension of violence and our need for spectacle in which some are expected to absorb the blow.
Title: Trifecta
Trifecta is a love letter to Mother Earth and the landscapes that sustain us. A young girl hurls the planet from her hand – not in destruction, but in care, like casting a seed into the future. Anchoring the composition is an inspired ‘Circle of Life’ symbol, the visual and spiritual glue. Trifecta honors the interconnected dance of life, land, and legacy. It reminds us that what we hold, we shape – and what we shape, shapes us.
Title: Throw Shade
A bold textile, rich with color and history, forms the backdrop. Bricks rise and Mt. Rushmore looms. A boy hurls a chapal or sandal at the monument and a chain of dangling shoes hints at other stories and steps taken. Is this an act of hate, love, or playful irreverence? What does the way in which we resist or view the resistance of others reveal about who we are?
Title: On the Road
Written in Urdu, On the Road connects Kerouac’s cross-continental beat anthem to ancestral movement and modern migrations. This is not the myth of the Western drifter – it’s the story of new roads, bodies in motion, and self-authorship in defiance of inherited maps. It pulses with the thrill of the ride and the joy of choosing your own direction.
Title: It Was All A Dream
It Was All a Dream explores the inevitability of change and the quiet persistence of beginnings. The magnetic tape of a cassette unfurls like memory or release. A background of Badlands formations speak of erosion and endurance, while lake homes float like suspended thoughts. Gold squares leap across shifting terrain, and a woman stands resolute with bottle in hand. Viewers are invited to navigate the layered terrain of memory, risk, and renewal. What do we build from what we let go?
Title: Truth, Bent Like Light
Truth, Bent Like Light blends ancient echoes with modern silence. Set against a weathered wall in Oaxaca, two humans stand beside stick-figure beings resembling ancestral cave drawings. Mathematical forms, Arabic numerals, and the refraction of light point to Muslim scientific contributions – knowledge that has traveled far. A patterned border invokes the circle of life and indigenous cosmology. In a world where much is overlooked or flattened, the viewer is challenged to look again. What does it mean to be seen, heard, or understood? Like light traveling through the atmosphere or water, is all truth distorted before it can be received?
Title: David
Michelangelo’s David in the red glow of a bathroom window at London’s Opium bar, embedded with the agony of Damned Man from the Sistine Chapel and with an airy, resilient palm tree. In a swelter of judgment and temptation, strength and stillness can rise.
Title: Chai Tea
A sprig of tea leaves – small, delicate, yet potent – is flanked by merchant ships wreathed in Indian sepoys or local soldiers enlisted to protect colonial commerce. The redundant words ‘chai tea’ hover near the top, and all flows down into a simple tea cup. The piece invites viewers to consider how global goods carry histories – and how language, like trade, is never neutral.
Title: Do You See What I See?
Do You See What I See unfolds like a dream in fragments, with familiar pieces layered out of sequence, time, and logic. Echoing the way we construct memory – part fact, part feeling, this arrangement invites both curiosity and confusion. The viewer is challenged to slow down, look again, find meaning. It’s not about what’s happening, but about how we see.
Title: Take A Bow
A dancing pig commands the stage – her joy exaggerated and unsettling – before a passive audience and parked motorcycles. A mother and child walk with backs turned, balloons in hand, and bombers overhead. The artwork confronts the absurdity of violence and the strange roles we inhabit: participant, witness, survivor, performer. It asks how we protect joy, how silence can be complicity, and how – even in the theatre of destruction – we keep walking.
Title: Stillness in the Center
Shot in black and white at Yellowstone, a starkly beautiful landscape is interrupted by an abstraction that connects the seen and unseen worlds in which we live.
Title: Butterfly In Transit
Butterfly In Transit is anchored by an ornate Ottoman-style frame – a nod to history, empire, and identity. Inside, a figure gazes out, with multicolored lines streaming like tears or threads of self, and, in the corner, Khalil Gibran appears on the wall. Fuchsia stripes stretch vertically like the bars of a cage. Yet a bird flutters, and vines creep, hinting at life’s persistence and the inevitability of growth. What parts of us are caged, and what does it take to let them fly?
Title: The Show
The Show is a show within a show within a show – where myth, media, and manipulation blur. A family stares transfixed at a television surrounded by images of upheaval. World leaders huddle early in the last century while Isis, the Nile Goddess, adds a narrative of cyclical power that predates politics and outlasts propaganda. Who holds the remote and who holds the truth?
Title: Olive Card
Fragments of a US flag painting by Jasper Johns, a woman’s face, and a junkyard reflect a negotiation between borders, systems, and self to form identity. Multi-directional lines cut through like migration routes or fault lines. When the journey defines you, what do you carry, and what do you leave behind?
Title: Act II, Scene I
Multiple figures emerge against a brick wall at Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology: wrestlers lock their bodies in a staged battle; women hover in states of exposure and concealment, vulnerability and defiance; boys on a bicycle gaze outward with innocence or foreboding. It’s about consequences, often borne by bystanders, and the stories that walls hold long after the noise fades.
Title: Self Portrait with Feathers
A crowd of small figures gaze upward at the hovering, Godzilla-sized artist. Gondolas glide like electric currents of thought or spirit, and voyeurs stand in tiny windows. A meditation on what it means to be fully exposed; to carry the weight of symbol and scale; to channel the chaos of experience into something honest. Love in its most simple and radical form.
Title: Sedona
Dabs of bright paint dance across the surface of red rock formations like confetti on stone. This piece celebrates the intersection of natural wonder and human imagination, inviting viewers to see familiar places through a more vibrant, curious lens.