Artist Bio

Umber Majeed is a multidisciplinary visual artist and educator. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in 2016 and graduated from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2013. Her writing, performance, and animation work engage with familial archives to explore the Pakistani state, urban, and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens. Majeed is currently a Y12 NEW INC member in the Extended Realities Track. Her work has been acquired by several private collections, including the Lekha and Anupam Poddar Collection at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, India.

Tell us about yourself.

UM: I am an American-born, Queer Muslim woman, descended from Pakistan. My practice engages with archives to explore South Asian state, urban, and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens. Speculative fiction, collage, and digital interfaces are formal and conceptual tools that I use in my interdisciplinary art practice.

My art training in Pakistan, New York, and Lebanon has activated a map of cultural hybridity where I meld humor, lush visuality, and disjointed perspectives within multimedia works that use drawings, animations, and multimedia installations.

Your practice around the theme of Trans-Pakistan has evolved over the years. Where did this inquiry first come from?

UM: The project I proposed for the residency is a continuation of an ongoing project I have been working on for a few years, called Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Long Live Trans-Pakistan). The core of my research is a ‘digital’ revitalization of my uncle’s travel agency called “Trans-Pakistan”, which was once owned and operated out of Islamabad, Pakistan, in the 1990s until the early 2000s. It went out of operation prematurely due to the US’s “War on Terror” that was waged against Afghanistan and Iraq, which also devastated Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, destabilizing the SWANA region through an extensive imperialist campaign that furthered US’s interests in coercing neoliberal relations, expansionism, regional control of oil, leading to massive outspread of Islamophobia via repressive travel policies, the list goes on.

My practice uses this speculative tourism agency to explore numerous case studies in Pakistan and South Asian diasporic communities abroad. The projects relate to gentrification and land politics, as well as incorporating the politics and aesthetics of anti-surveillance, piracy-bootleg, and protest cultures throughout South Asia.

You mentioned you looked at specific case studies to dive into this research. What were they?

UM: So far, I have had two case studies; one, I focused on a corrupt housing community in Lahore, Pakistan. And the second one was the Pakistan Pavilion in the 1964 New York World’s Fair, which I will dive into later. For the housing community, I traveled to Lahore for a couple of years to visit and investigate this gated community that was built for overseas [high-income] Pakistanis. I interviewed craftspeople, many of whom were gentrified out of the area through an illegal land grab conducted by the largest private real estate developer, Bahria Town. This corporation builds and manages luxurious hospitality businesses and gated communities throughout Pakistan. Much of the design and data I took were informed by the company’s ethos of urban design, which featured replicas of well-known European monuments and heritage sites, such as the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and Trafalgar Square; it had its own version of copy culture, which was different from the pirated aesthetics I usually reference in my work. This only highlighted how important Western interests and the pervasive Islamic security apparatus were to this process of gentrification.

The ultimate goal for this case study is to develop an Augmented Reality walking tour app that incorporates the politics of the land acquisition in Pakistan, the narrative of the people who existed there before the development of the housing community, the neo-colonization, and the long-term effects of neoliberal economics that devastated the land. I would like to discuss the issues around the labor used to build these communities and the domestic labor that upkeeps them. 

From this research, I created multiple installations using family and Pakistani state archive materials and crafted the design around a particular digital aesthetic that pulls together imagery I have drawn, collected ephemera, Urdu maps, and scanned publications by bringing them into a 3D animation space. Through this process, I echo the aesthetics of digital piracy and copy culture, an inherent part of my research.

UM: In 2020, as a technology resident at Pioneer Works, I developed Fotocopy.net, an interactive, promotional virtual tourist experience. I combined familial archives, the digital interface, tourism, and the context of gentrification in South Asia, encouraging viewers to loiter around in this kitsch imaginary of corporate culture and critical analysis. I turned my uncle’s failed tourism company, “Trans-Pakistan Adventure Services,” into a web environment, a company that toured foreigners to various landscapes and treks in Pakistan, now traversing the web. This space was a playful invitation for people to draw, listen to music, and peruse. I had animation support from Granville Jones Jr, a creative technologist intern, and coding/sound design by Tommy Martinez, then Director of the Technology residency at PW, and now a professor at NYU, who also helps run the Integrated Design & Media studio at NYU Tandon @ the Yard. 

I explored the ideas around simulacra, “the copy,” and the concept “Pirate Modernity,” by Indian media theorist Ravi Sundaram, which talks about how new media and technology have shaped landscapes of Delhi [and cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America], bypassing official infrastructure through unauthorized networks for housing, electricity, and media. Here, the dissemination of media culture through “the copy” serves as a representation of subaltern populations across cities worldwide.

The next phase of this series was a solo presentation at Pioneer Works, which happened after my 2020 residency. I merged elements of AR, sculpture, and video to create a pop-up promo exhibition, Made in Trans-pakistan (2022). In other words, it was an interactive multimedia installation, comprising two activations, and to visually separate the space, the walls were painted white on one half, and black on the other. Each side of the gallery had a custom AR experience, physical sculptural components, and vinyl wrapping around the space depicting an Urdu poem.

Inspired by the architecture of Bahria Town’s real estate developments, I created a distorted ceramic replica (pirated copy) of the monumental fountains at the centers of hyper-manicured roundabouts. My version of the Gorah ki chowk (horse roundabout) sits atop a hexagonal column, embedded with ceramic stars, all in pristine white, evoking the image of an ivory tower. I used AR to animate the fountain by scanning plastic bags that I found around the development in Lahore, to create the texture of water flowing out of the QR-code-horse-lined fountain on screen. This year, at NEW INC’s DEMO 2026 Total Flow showcase, which is curated by Mindy Seu and produced by Cody Moy, the horse sculpture component of this installation will be on display. I’ll be exhibiting work alongside 15 members of the NEW INC cohort.

On the opposite end of the room, there was another interactive AR component with a screen aimed at a low platform covered in a black-and-white tile pattern. Facing the platform, where people could take photos, was an iPad screen with AR animations featuring scanned material and phrases found in shops in Karachi that sold pirated media, such as DVDs and VHS tapes. I collaborated with an Urdu poet, Asad Alvi, to work on these phrases and the larger vinyl poem, adapting text from 13th-century poems, specifically a paradoxographical* account, Aja’ib al-Makhluqat (The Wonders of Creatures and the Marvels of Creation), of celestial and terrestrial cosmography. Looking at a work that merges the traditional Islamic sciences of astronomy, geography, and taxonomy with the metaphysical astrology and angels. Specifically focusing on passages that describe the collapse of land and sky, as well as queering hierarchies in the human-to-animal relationship. 

*Note: paradoxographical, or paradoxography, refers to classic literature that deals with the abnormal or unexplained phenomena occurring in the natural world. 

Portioning off the installation into half, where the Black and White walls meet, is sectioned off by tectonic shift, with maps and arrows, vinyl decals like those used in gallery wall text, directing viewers to move through the space in a counterclockwise direction–viewers move in the direction as one reads in the language of Urdu. Throughout the installation, a musical score is played made from field recordings taken in the Lahore Bahria Town development, which, in post-production, were glitched and woven to create a blanket of ambient noise. I played with the idea of pirated aesthetics, language, sound, and the subversion of urban planning to hit at the diasporic double consciousness* that underlies my practice.

Note: Diasporic double consciousness comes out of this idea explored by W.E.B. DuBois, of “two-ness”, two souls in one body, Black and American. Under double consciousness, diasporic individuals experience deep internal conflict and alienation as they move through marginalization and competing allegiances- rising out of colonialism and displacement–where someone can see oneself through their own eyes but at the same time can have a distorted, prejudiced perception of themselves, that’s usually brought on by dominant society.

And, for the latest iteration of the project, I presented an exhibition, J😊Y TECH (2025), at the Queens Museum for the QM-Jerome Fellowship showcase, which was organized by Lindsey Berfond, the Assistant Curator and Studio Program Manager.

I was researching the Pakistan Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair in Queens, where over 80 nations and 300 American companies presented exhibitions, performances, and activities. I looked into materials at the New York Public Library, including the World Fair special collections, photographs, brochures, and ephemera. Questions arose around the methodology of the archiving process to see what was archived and who archived it. I also tried to find information on who visited the pavilion. But there were many gaps in these archives around the international pavilions, and important materials were available online through community forums such as https://www.worldsfairphotos.com/. This was the opposite for the corporate exhibitions, which had abundant donations from people and whose families had visited. 

In this fair, many post-colonial nations participated, including Jordan, Lebanon, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Sudan, to name a few. So it was quite an opportunity for newly formed sovereign states to craft a narrative about what their nation-state is; what their new republic looks like, with Pakistan included in that.

I was also looking at what was occurring in Pakistan, where, in the 60s, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan began to rupture; a rupture underscored by rising economic and political disparity. Bengalis in the East, despite constituting a majority of the population, had limited representation. As uprisings and autonomous movements were gaining traction in the East, the [West] Pakistani government, in collaboration with counter-insurgency forces, carried out a genocide to subdue the Bengali population and impede their self-determination movement. It was important as someone who is of “West Pakistani” descent to acknowledge and hold space for this devastating genocide in the wake of the many genocides that are currently taking place in the world.

J😊Y TECH functions as a speculative counter-archive that offers alternative sources to fill gaps we experience in institutional archives, to question the logic around the nation-state. I am collapsing two different time-scapes: the idealism of new republics developed by post-colonial nation-states then, and the implications of such convictions in our contemporary context. Previously, a form of violence was conducted by colonial powers, and another form emerged and was perpetuated by the nation-state paradigm, within its borders. 

This installation is a guide that takes viewers through my re-imagination of the Pakistan Pavilion at the 64-65 New York World’s Fair, integrating “Trans-Pakistan Adventure Services” and reanimating Joy Tech, an electronic repair shop in Jackson Heights, Queens. Each component of the installation includes inspiration from the dynamic storefront merchandising you can find in phone repair shops in Queens, the static web 1.0 interfaces, and WhatsApp memes aesthetics. All of this is used to create the fictional promotional campaigns and reimagined artifacts of the Pakistan Pavilion.

From hand-drawn posters and reconfigured maps to interactive AR postcards and 3D animations, the exhibition of this work references the Pakistan Pavilion’s architecture, displays, goods for sale, and other fragments of the pavilion circulating online. As we see, histories are in a constant state of being redefined, blurring the lines between what is considered official or unauthorized, authentic or propaganda, legible or opaque. The AR production support was provided by Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center through the Technology Immersion program; AR programming and coding by Danielle McPhatter.*

*Danielle McPhatter is currently the Extended Realities Track mentor at NEW INC.

A pivotal aspect of this exhibition that ties everything together through narration, is the digital character (っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ i@ppLe♥, a tour guide of Trans-Pakistan Adventure Services. Her voice represents History (with a capital h), and her character politely interrupts and negates South Asian histories with a Western, white-washed narrative. She imitates the voices of computer-generated Bangla and recorded Urdu storytellers in the video. She will return as a digital animation interacting with me in a live Performance-Lecture that I am developing during my time here at the Eyebeam residency. 

The lecture will expand on my concept of “South, (West) Asian digital kitsch,” and copy-left ethos that has been a big part of my practice since the beginning of this research project.

What are some other common threads you have been exploring in Trans-Pakistan over the years? What are the more recent developments in this process?

UM: I use architectural design and historical events specific to Pakistan to negate convoluted understandings of nationalism, community, and self within the modernist nation-state paradigm. Previous projects have conceptually incorporated state histories such as nuclear nationalism and my family ties to the 90’s photography scene in Islamabad, Pakistan. I also looked into the analog photography archives of my late, maternal, grandfather, Pirzada Abdul Waheed, who obsessively photographed Islamabad, the first Pakistani city, designed by a Greek urban-planner and the National Mosque, Faisal Mosque, funded by the government of Saudi Arabia. The international presence in the making of the first Pakistani city, post-1947 Partition, explores the illusions of a holistic national identity. These concepts are emphasized as my interest in temporal disjunctures in South Asia’s urban landscape serve as catalysts for proposing alternative futures. 

More recently, I have used immersive XR media, video, and digital interfaces to synthesize a multitude of sources, including intricate drawings, familial archives, stock imagery, and Urdu publications on poetry and tourism. My practice is becoming more interactive and socially engaged, in which the public and the user body are active components of the artistic experience. I focus on creating a range of experiences through installations that blur the line between physical and digital materials–augmented reality software objects that are created from scans of hand-drawn images, then reconfigured in digital space.

Since you have taken us on this journey through “Trans-Pakistan” in all its iterations, what are some influences shaping you, as you continue to develop your practice? 

UM: Important influences in my practice include artists such as Morehshin Allahyari, Walid Raad, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Shezad Dawood. I am also inspired by digital archival projects within the SWANA region. I am excited to be in collaboration with  Saad Khan of Khajistan Archive and Amad Ansari of Palestine Online, both of whose work I have been following for a long time. I will be in conversation with them for a NEW INC Studio DEMO session on SWANA Digital Kitsch and the evolution of digital, regional archives on June 4th. We will talk about the challenges that come with preserving histories that include Queer SWANA and Palestinian internet archives and dive into the various ways that these narratives are accessed and circulated across the web. 

Where will you take us next? 

UM: My proposal for this residency as mentioned before is to develop a Performance Lecture, with a character that I used in J😊Y TECH, the tour guide, (っ◔◡◔)っ ♥i@ppLe ♥. I am currently in the process of writing a script that examines bootleg culture and anti-surveillance within the context of south asian technological infrastructures. The format of the performance will take on a live conversation with a (pre-recorded) animated avatar of ♥i@ppLe ♥ , in front of an audience and viewers using their own smartphone to view a collective AR experience. My plan is to take footage, edit a 3D animation and do some 3d printing experiments that will facilitate the foundation for this performance.

How are you grappling with the ideas of speculating on plurality in your practice?

UM: Through my artistic practice, a pluralistic commons is created through incorporating piracy, Global Majority digital kitsch, and hand crafted aesthetics within the interface. These concepts function as a political venture; where material practice, labor, and inquiry can collide. The multimedia installations and performance experience is intended to gather participants and invite them into the nuances of textures and specificities of low res, copy culture in South Asia*—specifically presenting accessibility, creative commons, and copyleft through the aesthetic and imagery of Trans-Pakistan Adventure Services. A question I have been thinking about is what does gathering/protest look like in the guise of XR media and technology today?  

*In a 2022 interview published in Pioneer Work’s Broadcast channel, Nora N. Khan (a writer, editor, curator, and Eyebeam alum) and Umber Majeed speak about the ‘Made in Trans-Pakistan’ 2022 exhibition. Once you’re done here, please give that a read!