Binary Lives

The body of work was made in response to subcultural spaces that I became familiar with while pursuing my education in Lahore. The mural paintings consisted of intricate patterns with labor-intensive methods to depict narratives that synthesized my formal concerns and became a description of the interaction with marginalized communities, which resulted in my thesis show,’ Binary Lives,’ in 2007.

The paintings depicted an extracted pattern of tiger skin, a natural predatory animal, as a symbolic reference to talk about opposing relationships. The pattern was then repeated using mathematical sequences to achieve a mesh-like structure, and it was then deconstructed to break the order of the arrangement to transcend visual complexity.

Marginalized communities and social matrices that dominated the city’s landscape made me think of how people unite and form different social groups and why some exist in small groups. These groups appeared seemingly interwoven within each other. They made me think of connecting anthropological responses to natural systems that appear disorderly, fragmented, and disarrayed yet have an inward order, making me think of fractal relationships. Hypothetically framing these factions in a self-similar pattern, a pattern of behavior, a social pattern, a pattern of relationships, and thus dictating a complex system was a point of departure to create an extended body of work.