Umber Majeed

Memories Fade … Photographs Shouldn’t (2016) is a video animation incorporating the analog photographic archive of the artist’s maternal grandfather, Pirzada Abdul Waheed. Waheed was a young member of the Muslim League during the Partition of 1947 and supported the development of Pakistan. The photographs presented are from the late 1970s through the early 2000s, when Waheed was documenting the construction and development of the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan (National Mosque of Pakistan). The photographs range in subject from laborers on the construction site to the nuances of the Islamic architecture. The artist reconfigured the aesthetics of the photos through digital manipulation, creating a intergenerational dialogue within the work.

The artist is interested in blurring the lines between native and foreign using the Faisal Mosque as a representation of national identity. The Faisal Mosque was funded by King Faisal bin Abdul-Aziz and the government of Saudi Arabia and designed by a Turkish architect, Vedat Ali Dalokay. The facts reflect the influence of a particular kind of Islamization that still shapes Pakistan today. 

The Complete Picture (2016) is a series of color pencil drawings based on photographic materials from the artist’s grandfather’s archive. The archive remains uncategorized and inaccessible due to family inheritance issues; the artist therefore highlights the containers of and markings on the photographs she owns, including the family albums, notes on the back of photographs, and imagery from popular culture on the Fujifilm pamphlets in which the photographs are haphazardly stored. umbermajeed.com