● ● ● Selected Works

2025

Breathing Algorithms

Co-Curator
6-9 November, 2025

In the wake of the 2025 AI Action Summit, the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence in shaping our societies, cultures, and creative futures has taken centre stage. As AI becomes increasingly embedded in our daily lives, from predictive algorithms to creative collaboration, its implications for justice, equity, and sustainability demand critical artistic inquiry. In parallel, the world is grappling with the escalating climate crisis-particularly in countries like Pakistan, where urban centres are suffocating under the weight of environmental neglect.

As the world marked the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement this November, conversations around climate justice, ethical technologies, and cross-cultural collaboration are more urgent than ever. In Lahore, a city choked by recurring smog and environmental degradation, global themes have intensely local resonances. The city’s worsening air quality is a public health crisis and a mirror reflecting structural inequalities, ecological apathy, and gendered vulnerabilities. It is also a call to action: to imagine new futures where technology, art, and ethics converge for sustainable and inclusive change. The convergence of technology, AI, and climate change presents profound implications for cultural heritage, particularly in vulnerable cities like Lahore.

Supported by:
Alliance Française de Lahore, French Embassy in Pakistan, Institut Français, UNESCO, Beaconhouse National University (SVAD), R Space, Critical Futures Media/Lab, Aangun Cultural Center.

In the Press:

Festival Poster

Unseen Paradox by Muhammad Bux

Mystic Nights by Aamina Hashmi/ Poday Wali

Karoonjhar as Kin by Areesha Khuwaja

Aamina Hashmi with Fabrice Disdier

“Algar” by Zuha Farooq

Airborne Memory: Mapping Lahore’s AQI by Fajr Faisal & Huzaifa Ahmad

A letter to my grandchild in 2100 by Bahman Fakouri & Megan Smith

Women vs Machines

Co-Curator
11-16 April 2025

“Women Vs Machines” aimed to address the challenges – both obvious and subtle – that women face in the technology sector. The festival encouraged artists to seek innovative, creative responses to problems that respect complexity while inspiring, encouraging, and activating a gender-inclusive digital future.

Long seen as helpless or unable to use or contribute to technology, women in tech spaces are still a rare sight, and their contributions to early and ongoing technological advancements are ignored and erased from history. Companies and industries dedicated to the future of digital spaces, such as Web3 or the metaverse, are generally dominated by men. The concept was designed to consider the future of digital spaces as seen from a gender perspective. This can mean the digital spaces themselves – inviting questions of access, interaction, and safety – as well as the infrastructure and systems needed to support them. For example, in AI and robotics, ‘female’ gendered robots or avatars feature heavily, yet women themselves are rarely accepted or welcome in spaces where these models are built or coded.

Supported by:
Beaconhouse National University (SVAD), Alliance Française de Lahore, French Embassy in Pakistan, Institut Français, UNESCO Chair on Inclusion through Art, and The Little Art.

In the Press:

Festival Poster

Who Scripts the Play? by Anusha Khalid

Audiences at the gallery

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder by Audrey Richard-Laurent & Emil Hasnain

In Motion by Vania Mazhar

Audiences infront of The Paradise Beneath the Surface by Mahnoor Ali Shah

Is the City Not Mine Too? by Zainab Hussain & Tehreem Zafar

Symbiotic Rituals by Justine Emard

2023

Metaverse Bodies [Hybrid]

Co-Curator
12-15 October, 2023

Metaverse Bodies explored the embodied experience of reality at a time when digital and physical worlds were becoming increasingly intertwined. Curated for the second edition of the Lahore Digital Arts Festival in 2023, the exhibition examined how emerging virtual environments, avatars, and immersive technologies were reshaping ideas of identity, existence, presence, and physicality. It asked how embodied beings might inhabit increasingly digital spaces, where the boundaries between physical and virtual realities were becoming less distinct.

The exhibition brought together digital works that considered the social, ethical, philosophical, and political implications of the metaverse. Artists explored questions of inclusion and exclusion, body image, prejudice, isolation, physical touch, privacy, and the ways digital realities could reproduce or challenge existing power structures. The curatorial framework centred on four interconnected themes: climate change, gender, privacy, and heritage, inviting audiences to consider not only what the metaverse might become, but how it was already changing the way we understood ourselves and the world around us.

Supported by:
The EUNIC–Pakistan Cluster (embassies of Italy, Austria, Czechia, France, the Goethe‑Institut, Embassy of Germany, and EU Delegation), along with Beaconhouse National University, National College of Arts Lahore, Institute for Art and Culture, Kinnaird College for Women University, Comsats University Islamabad, Government of Punjab, Lahore Museum, Punjab IT Board Incubator, Aangun, Haam Gallery, Numaish Gah Gallery, The Colony, Zahoor Ikhlaq Gallery, The Little Art, Dafarkhwan co‑working, Kilam Law Associates, Dev Beans IT Solutions, MadLab, and Politics of the Machines Conference.

In the Press:

Festival Poster for Online Edition

Festival Poster for Physical Edition

Still of an artwork showcase from IAC

Series by Omar Gilani

Still of a Performance from BNU

Potrait On The Fly by Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau

Love Umberlla by Anton Sahler

Audience member enjoying VR at NCA

The gods by Agnes Michalczyk

2022

Dreaming The Cities II [Online]

Co-Curator
5-25 March, 2022

The second edition of Dreaming the Cities expanded the dialogue of the Lahore Digital Arts Festival into a tri-city collaboration, connecting Lahore and Karachi with Paris. Conceived as a cross-continental exchange, the project paired artists from each city and facilitated three sessions of dialogue, where they reflected on urban identity, digital culture, and the politics of space. These exchanges culminated in the creation of collaborative artworks, which responded to their shared conversations and local contexts.

Dreaming the Cities II not only strengthened creative ties between South Asia and Europe but also foregrounded how artists envision future cities—spaces that are simultaneously physical, digital, and imagined.

Supported by:
Produced with the support of the French Embassy in Pakistan.

Produced Works:
Billi Melancolie was a collaborative music and visual project by Marylou Petot and Areeb Tariq, created as part of Dreaming The Cities 2.0. The duo imagined their own cross-cultural band, combining French and Pakistani influences to explore ideas of home, family, belonging, and life in the city.

Billi Melancolie: Une vraie famille 1/3
Billi Melancolie: The Reason I Love My Cat 2/3
Billi Melancolie: Kitni Chai 3/3

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, by Emil Hasnain and Audrey Richard-Laurent, explored the duality of the human body, where beauty and grotesquerie coexist. Through merging and fragmented bodies, the artists examined imperfections, ageing, illness, genetics, and environmental pollutants, while questioning how our judgments of bodies often reveal our own perceptions and insecurities.

2021

Dreaming The Cities I [Online]

Co-Curator
10-25 October, 2021

The first edition of Dreaming The Cities connected the historic city of Lahore, Pakistan, with the multicultural metropolis of São Paulo, Brazil. Three artist pairs from the two cities took part in four sessions of dialogue, exchange, and collaborative exploration, drawing on local cultures and creative practices to imagine and speculate on possible urban futures. The project culminated in a series of artistic performances presented to the public in a live session, transforming the artists’ exchanges into creative responses to the cities they inhabited.

Supported by:
Produced with support from DICE – Developing Inclusive and Creative Economies, British Council.

Recorded Presentation of the Event

Produced Works:

Post Reality [Online]

Co-Curator
5-23 March, 2021

Additional Collaboration with NCA in October 2021

Post Reality examined how the rapid expansion of digital spaces had transformed our understanding of reality, identity, and human interaction. As communication, memories, and information increasingly moved online, the boundaries between physical and digital realities became less defined. Digital spaces could be created, altered, augmented, and manipulated, challenging traditional ideas of what was real and how reality was experienced. The project also explored the changing nature of identity through digital profiles, avatars, and multiple online personas. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this shift, making digital spaces central to work, education, communication, and social life. As people navigated between the desire to return to physical interaction and the growing dependence on digital environments, the project reflected on the tensions between these two realities, exploring how they increasingly overlapped, influenced one another, and reshaped contemporary experiences of identity and presence.

Supported by:
Alliance Française Pakistan, French Embassy in Pakistan

In the Press: