Huma Mulji
Huma Mulji works with sculptural installation, photography, collage and drawing. The city, the everyday and the overlooked, all serve as subjects in her deliberately awkward artworks. Mining out the dysfunctional, the futile, the funny, the sorrowful and the resilient, the works stand as unwieldy, inconvenient witnesses to time and place.
Mulji’s participation in recent exhibitions includes In the Open and in Stealth MACBA, Barcelona (2018), We look at Animals Because, Critical Distance Center for Curators, Toronto, Canada (2018), Witness, Karachi Biennale 2017, welcome to what we took from is the state, Queens Museum, New York, USA (2017), A country of Last Things, Koel Gallery, Karachi, (2016), The Great Game, Irani Pavilion, Venice Biennale, (2015) Burning Down the House, 10th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, (2014). She was a recipient of the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013, and the Nigaah Award for photography in 2017.
She currently lives in Bristol, UK and is Lecturer, BA Hons. Fine Art, at Plymouth College of Art and University of the West of England, Bristol.
Works
Arabian Delight
Arabian Delight was commissioned by the Pakistani Pavilion, ‘Desperately Seeking Paradise’, for Art Dubai 2008. The work addresses the decades of state manipulated erasure, the Arabisation of Pakistan, from its identity as a South Asian country, to that of an Islamic Republic.
Anatomy of a Landscape
This suite of 10 inkjet prints were taken during a two-week residency, at the Pioneer Cement factory in Khushaab, Pakistan. The arid landscape of limestone and clay, feeds the cement production towards the CPEC corridor, which promises to provide a highway connecting China with Pakistan. These images were excavated from this obiquitous gray of the factory, and the garden in the guesthouse.