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As a British expat and the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, my background informs my practice, which maps patterns of migration across multiple scales and geographies, starting with my grandfather’s walk from Delhi to Lahore during the Partition of British India at age seven. I’m interested in the question of invasiveness (what came first, and what’s truly invasive?) and how it complicates the binary thinking around hypernationalisms. Displacements are never singular events; my grandfather’s walk was just a step in the proceedings that eventually brought my family to the UK as asylum seekers in the 1960s. Their great migration and successive attempts to resist assimilative forces, perform cultural and religious activities in unfavorable spaces, and understand the confusing social and bureaucratic strictures of their new environments form the DNA of my work.

I examine indigeneity and invasiveness across various scales: human (overwhelming British tourists abroad), non-human (tumbleweeds, a.k.a. “Russian Invaders,” in America and their country of origin), and corporate (the 19,600+ Dollar General stores manufacturing American domesticity in China). With collaborators, I use research, drawing, and fabrication to identify how architecture plays into the politics of nostalgia, flattening cultures and distorting diasporic identities to establish new forms of alterity and national pride. These subjects are of the utmost importance as nationalist ideologies usher in new waves of ethnic succession, geopolitical tensions, and violence under the guise of reviving “lost” golden ages.

+ Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of New Mexico
+ Architectural Design PhD student at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London