2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition

Through large-scale installations, sculptures, and tapestries, my work began with my experience of social and political alienation as a woman with Prurigo Nodularis in Pakistan. Living with a visible skin condition exposed how the female body becomes a site of scrutiny and exclusion, yet this personal narrative has evolved into broader explorations of embodiment, beauty, and violence on dispossessed bodies. Materials are essential collaborators in my practice, along with my experiences and research. My methodology is both intuitive and highly labor-intensive as I engage with oxidized metal, human hair, and culturally specific textiles. Forms are deconstructed and reconstructed through pleating, gathering, sculpting, and stitching. My use of bleach to mark and erode fabric initially referenced my skin’s volatility but now speaks to larger processes of transformation and resilience. My work thrives on juxtaposition: industrial metals intertwined with culturally significant textiles like velvet and banarsi. Since relocating to New York City, my practice has evolved in dialogue with the exposed infrastructure and heterogeneity of the urban landscape, transforming my language and expanding my scale while informing installations that navigate between cultural memory and material innovation. I critique and celebrate Pakistani culture, particularly jugaad (frugal innovation). My art provokes viewers to oscillate between attraction and repulsion, questioning our embodiment and cultural conditioning while arguing for a beauty that emerges through cycles of decay and transformation.

Sumaiya Saiyed (b. 1994, Karachi) is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. She holds a BFA from Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (2019) and an MFA from Parsons School of Design (2025), where she received the Presidential Scholarship and was nominated for the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship and The AICAD Teaching Fellowship. After her BFA, Saiyed worked in Pakistani film production as a set designer, influencing her spatial approach. Through large-scale installations, sculptures, and tapestries, she explores the politics surrounding the female body in the Pakistani context. Her practice thrives on material contradictions, pairing industrial metals with culturally significant textiles in works like “حیات نو Hayat-e-Nuh.” Influenced by Karachi’s “jugaad” tradition of resourceful innovation, she uses oxidized metal, human hair, and bleach-marked fabrics that mirror bodily imprints. What began as concealing bodily conditions has transformed into celebrating these marks. Her New York works respond to urban infrastructure while both celebrating and critiquing her Pakistani heritage, conceptually stitching together memories and socio-political discomforts. Recent exhibitions include “What Threads Us Together” (2024), “Displaced Landscape” (2023), and “Cosmic Echoes” (2023) at Parsons, as well as “This is Me: Identity and Art in an Emerging Pakistan” (2020) in Cleveland.