Check out Aruna D’Souzas’s review in 4Columns Magazine of Fine Arts MFA alum Umber Majeed’s exhibition “Made in Trans-Pakistan!” The exhibition is on view until December 11th, 2022.
“Trans-Pakistan Zindabad takes the form of speculative fiction: What if Pirzada’s travel agency still existed? This chapter of the project, Made in Trans-Pakistan, opens with two pieces on either side of the entry to the small gallery that houses the main part of the show: a short, looped video, Fotocopy.net (2021), and a lenticular print, Yeh Lo (2022), whose title translates roughly as “take this.” Centered on the original logo for the agency, both function as calling cards of its reincarnation. The works adopt an aesthetic that Majeed, in interviews, has referred to as “South Asian digital kitsch”—a mashup of pixelated elements defined by shifts in color, scale, resolution, and style that’s instantly recognizable to those familiar with the subcontinent. Fitting for a moment in which tourism has been made nearly impossible in Pakistan, they announce their offerings to be none other than Bahria Towns—places to which the public is given limited access to view their wonders: replicas of monuments including the Sphinx, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, and the Statue of Liberty. If Pakistanis cannot easily travel to the world, the world travels, in such simulacral communities, to Pakistan.”
-Aruna D’Souzas
Follow the link to read: https://4columns.org/d-souza-aruna/umber-majeed
