Umber Majeed (New York & Lahore)
Atomi Daamaki Wali Mohabbat (The Atomically Explosive Love)
Lecture-Performance
Synopsis: A multi-chapter animation that speaks to questions of nationalism, state propaganda and aesthetics, community, and self through speculative fiction. The narrative chronicles the history of nuclear power in Pakistan, the first ‘Muslim nuclear state’. In developing this artwork, Majeed used state and familial archives to intersect specific historical moments, starting with the successful nuclear tests performed in the 1990’s to the conception/destruction of a military-state monument, Chaghi Monument Hill. The reading through the female (herself), allows for a queering and alternative historicizing of South Asia in an age of global nationalist uprisings.
Umber Majeed’s FIELD MEETING participation is supported by The Digital Earth Fellowship & British Council and Hivos.
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Umber Majeed is a multidisciplinary visual artist based between New York and Lahore, Pakistan. Her writing, performances, and animation engage with familial archives to explore the specifics of the Pakistani state and its urban infrastructures through a feminist lens. Majeed is also a member of the Harem Hamam Collective in New York, and is a current keyholder artist in residence at the Lower East Side Printshop. Majeed has shown across venues in Pakistan, North America, and Europe. Her most recent exhibitions include Promises to Keep at apexart in New York (2017), Witness- Karachi Biennale in Karachi, Pakistan (2017), Volumes- Queens International 2018 at the Queens Museum in New York (2018), and In the Name of Hypersurface of the Present at the Rubber Factory in New York (2018). Her work has been acquired by several private collections, including the Lekha and Anupam Poddar Collection at Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, India.