Umber Majeed is a multidisciplinary visual artist, working in New York and Pakistan. She received her MFA from Parsons School of Design in New York (2016) and graduated from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan (2013). She is currently part of the Harem.Haram.Hamam Collective in New York and will have her debut solo exhibition ‘In the Name of Hypersurface of the Present’ at the Rubber Factory, New York in October 2018. She has taken part in group exhibitions, including The Museum: Within and Without, The State Hermitage Museum, St.Petersburg, Russia (2015), Promises to Keep, apexart, New York (2017), Witness- Karachi Biennale, Karachi, Pakistan (2017), and Volumes – Queens International, Queens Museum, New York (2018). Majeed is a recipient of numerous fellowships including the HWP Fellowship, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon (2017) and Refiguring Feminist Futures – Web Residency, Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM, Germany (2018).
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Umber Majeed research project Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Long Live Trans-Pakistan) is drawing from a range of familial archives, digital telecommunications, and mechanism of the Pakistani tourist industry in order to investigate current urbanization claims in Lahore. Following the years of martial law and post-War on Terror within Pakistan, activities between and within urban spaces has become heavily policed by state and neoliberal ventures. Majeed intends to revitalize her uncle’s failed tourism company, Trans-Pakistan, to bring into focus the contradiction of a transcendence into nostalgia/escapism that seems to be so deeply embedded in South Asian diaspora imagery. She is conducting research into alternate perspectives that deal with the orientation of the body as a political citizen, in relation to the performativity of hegemonic state policing within urban planning. The disjunctures across the South Asian diaspora of urbanscapes will act as a case study for her planned project, and its investigation into nostalgia, gentrification, and futurity.