Three-channel video, color, 5.1 sound, 25 minutes. Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film, with additional support from the Mondriaan Fund for the exhibition Nebula at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice. Through the prism of cinema, the work traces the dangerous journeys of undocumented migrants across vast lands, exploring distance as a condition of diasporic lives just as it is a position intrinsic to the act of filming. The artist invited a crew from the cinema industry of his native Lahore—also known as Lollywood—to script and direct a series of sequences, the narrative of which would be loosely based on videos found online. Recorded by migrants as they travel from South Asia to Europe, such videos give insight into the harshness of their peregrinations––which often last for years and sometimes do not reach the intended destination––as well as offering practical pieces of advice to those who have yet to depart. The artist edited the remade footage into poetic sequences where, however, only the conditions of their assembly are visible. Screenshots of the original videos appear occasionally on the script sheets, while excerpts are played on the crew members’ phones. Rather than attempting to represent the migrants’ experiences, the artist evokes them through the exhaustion of the crew under the scorching sun, the difficulties faced by the cameramen in locating the actors lost in the barren landscape, and the exaggerated gestures of the directors as they coordinate the filming from afar. Entirely created in a recording studio, the soundscape amplifies the divergence between what we see and what we hear, between the near and the far. It is an integral part of an investigation that looks for moments of truth in the mise-en-scène, for facts within fiction. The work considers the landscape thematically, as a physical and existential space through which to navigate in search of salvation, while underlining the distance between the image as testimony and the image as product, between those who experience dislocation and those who are spectators to it.

On International Human Rights Day, the artist commissioned a daylong camera workshop to take place in front of a sit-in protest for the victims of enforced disappearances in Pakistan. The guidelines from the artist required the instructor of the workshop to wear a collar microphone and keep cameras continually recording, and as a result, everything filmed can become part of the artist's present work. As we hear and at times see participants start interacting with the situation they are in, a few hours into learning protesters' outrage from years of wondering and waiting, it becomes merely a subject for the participants to record and learn from. However, towards the end of the exhausting day, their feelings begin to shift. The artist, as is typical of his practice, was again absent from the making of his own work. Having maintained a distance, he employed learning as a precondition to engage with an issue that is often ignored or even silenced by the authorities.

Every year, Muslims around the world celebrate one of their two annual holy festivals – the Eid-al-Adha, or “Feast of Sacrifice” – on the tenth day of the twelfth month of the Arab lunar calendar. It honors the willingness of the Prophet Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ismail as an act of obedience to Allah's command. However, before Ibrahim could sacrifice his own son, Allah provided him with a lamb to kill because of his willingness to sacrifice his son in the name of Allah. In commemoration of this absolute devotion, millions of animals have been ritually sacrificed to date. Meat from the sacrificed animals is considered intended for communal consumption, and some two-thirds of it is distributed among relatives, neighbors, and the poor. This is done despite the substantial costs that average households bear in buying and maintaining sacrificial animals. In fact, many believe that the longer the sacrificial animal is cared for, the greater the value of its sacrifice. As a result, many people buy animals well in advance of Eid, often months in advance, and lavish them with care and attention. The artist, just a day before the due sacrifice, invited animals and their owners to observe their relationship of days and months. The artist, via a designed narrative, intends to witness a bond that embodies love, care, and affection and, at the same time, ownership, power, and consumption. That is to say, the owner loves the animal but must also exercise the power of ownership to put it to death. By the time the film was edited and shown, all the animals present in it were sacrificed, shared, and possibly fully consumed.

In this work, the artist attempts to shape a memorial for the 219 persons who were burned to ashes while collecting fuel from a crashed oil container on July 11, 2017 near Ahmedpur East, Bahawalpur District, Pakistan. A fully laden fuel truck had toppled over when its driver took a rash turn when trying to get on a highway. The fuel it was carrying spilled over onto the road and nearby fields. Soon enough, hundreds of men, women and children from the village rushed to the crash site with kitchen utensils, baskets, plastic bottles, and whatever else they could find, in the hope of collecting some free fuel. However, the fuel caught fire and blew into a fireball that consumed all the free the fuel as well as many of the people trying to collect it. The artist saw this event as an attempt to transfer fuel from one container to the other – from one massive truck carrying 5,500 gallons of the Royal Dutch Shell to hundreds of small household containers meant to help extract as little as a few hundred milliliters for those carrying them. The film records a group of gas station workers associated with a filling station near the artist’s Pakistan production site, as they attempt to fill to their maximum capacity the household containers that the artist brought from his home.

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film for the project Mascarilla 19 – Codes of Domestic Violence. Sunsets, everyday is the result of an investigation that the artist undertook of the process, both physical and cinematic, involved in creating images of domestic violence. During the lockdown, some victims courageously used social media to share photos of their faces, as a way of encouraging other women to report such crimes. The marks on their bodies were the only tangible proof of the blows and pain they had suffered, and the artist took these as a point of departure for thinking about all the things that happen out of sight. Mahmood commissioned a production team in Lahore to create and film, in his absence, a repeated scene of domestic violence, based on his instructions and images of injuries that women shared. While the main crew was busy with this task, two camera operators were asked to constantly film the entire process and the elements of the set, down to the last detail. This method of working from a distance, invites a reflection on the artist’s role and authorship, turning him into a witness and observer of his own work. The process of staging violence is what generates the images on the screen, but the act itself is almost completely hidden from the viewer. We see only narrow closeups and small portions of women’s bodies. Rejecting spectacularization, the artist focuses instead on the cinematic process and the codes of its language. In this metacinema of violence, the onlookers are technicians, crewmembers, present settings and objects struggling with his exhausting work for sixteen straight hours of shooting. The camera explores the settings with a forensic gaze, and the objects that compose it are put on an equal footing with the people. Both are forced to witness to the violence enacted before them. The almost obsessive repetition of identical actions, like cleaning the floor, becomes a way of expressing the routine nature of violence. An act that is repeated with tragic continuity. Every day, as inevitable as the sunset. (text by Leonardo Bigazzi)

The work was conceived and later realised by exploring the odd possibility of hiring a group of professional protesters, who are occasionally employed by political parties, and other entities, to help demonstrate publicly on their behalf. The artist acquired their unconventional service at its usual rate of around 1 dollar per hour and a meal for each participant, to demonstrate by striking a complete menu of a nearby fast-food restaurant available to where the work took place. The artist using his phone kept on ordering online, accordingly they respond swiftly taking less than twenty minutes for each order to deliver, to be consumed fresh by the work, until the protesters grow tired and decided to leave. The present work invite ones ability to confront, in indirect conflict with the others skill of efficient making. The film crew documented collision within the parameters set by the artist. - I remained interested in the idea of a profession, which one takes to earn his or her living; what impressions their doing leaves on them with time, setting up certain way of thinking, influencing actions or even at times manifest itself into ones’ physical characteristics. I borrow only temporarily others’ idea of the work, into my idea of an artwork.

Basir Mahmood’s visit to Bradford and Mirpur triggered ‘new curiosities’ about self-defined identity and ‘otherness’ particularly within the Bradford Mirpuri community, explored in his new video work "moon-sighting". His epiphany was the realization that what we deem to be Mirpuri in Bradford can be defined as British in Mirpur. Identities become viewpoints through which the ‘other’ is viewed. The world of social media enables him to create an other-dimensional third space that allows re-imagination and performance of identities while facilitating a fluid switching of standpoints. A car becomes a narrative device by inhabiting the neutral space of a green-screen film studio. Mahmood has placed his collaborators and himself physically and metaphorically at the center of this work, implicating himself in a narrative of confusion and aggression. Within his work, Mahmood made a music video with Mirpur-based YouTube star Arslan Shabir. While Mahmood’s work was shown in a museum, Shabir’s music video went viral and was removed due to combative reactions. For Mahmood, the inquiry was to understand how the argument that took place through a song between so-called Mirpuris would play out in a so-called white museum, to the white audience, or in this case, to a British audience.

The artist has a growing interest in not making his own work himself. Rather, he likes to draw larger parameters within which his work may be performed by such collaborators as he may involve in the process of conceiving a work. Thus, for the present work, he had a film crew associated with Pakistan’s Lahore-based film industry, known as Lollywood, to collaborate with him. They were required to help him build a narrative for the work. In this, he assigned them the task of recreating and filming the after-images of the American Special Forces operation that resulted in the death of the infamous Al Qaeda supremo, Osama Bin Laden. The artist left the execution of the film to the imagination of his crew, allowing them space to reproduce the events as they saw fit. Whereas, the artist only observed the process of recreation that he initiated, his collaborators worked to form a narrative around the said event. Throughout making of the work, including the filming part, the cameraman, his assistant and the director of action wore collar mics as they worked to create fiction. The process of recreation soon started to form its own reality. This new reality rested between the factuality of the actual event and its fictive, and thus, imperfect reproduction; and, between the intention of the artist and its interpretation by the collaborators as they tried to resolve it into a work. This is the second collaboration of the artist with Lollywood, a Lahore-based film industry that is centered only miles away from his home. During its heyday, the film industry was amongst the largest film industries in the world, producing scores of movies every year. However, beginning around 1977, the once vibrant film industry began a dramatic collapse into creative banality, intellectual decadence and popular irrelevance. Today, it maintains a limited, almost peripheral existence in the arena of Pakistan’s socio- cultural production.

The author intends to tell a story of another. The course of re-narration takes place in someone else’s setting of temporal and physical space. What had been carried through time is to be performed again from early morning into the late evening. Participants arrive remembering the performed sequences. The camera now observes recalling of a memory and then the process of forgetting the borrowed narrative. It witnesses a recreation and records it getting subsumed into the narrative that no one keeps but the non-participating initiator. As the narrative plays out, he stays and waits to observe a reconciliation. While waiting, he recalls a song he grew up listening to which had been written by his father for a film. Both the author and his father were and remain unaware of the settings in which the song was to be placed. The film was never made. -- Beginning in the closing years of the first decade of the new millennium, a new cinema began to emerge in Pakistan, which has inspired hopes of revival of the local film industry. The present author, however, disputes the “newness” of the reviving industry, arguing instead that the idea of a revival is implicit in a return to once was. Lahore-based film industry, during its heyday was amongst the largest film industries in the world. However, beginning around 1977, the once vibrant film industry began a dramatic collapse into creative banality, intellectual decadence and popular irrelevance, marking its end. The new wave has clear differences from what once was. This new cinema wave is led, on the one hand, by a new generation of filmmakers, many of whom have been trained abroad; and on the other, by a generation of actors and technicians, most of whom began their careers on television, or have otherwise remained affiliated with the same. Yet, despite this recent influx of fresh talent, the broader industry itself remains beset by obsolete studios, equipment, cinematic techniques and, actors and extras. Even as the new cinema wave continues to blaze trails across Pakistani cinema skies, the old film industry has struggled to maintain its limited, almost peripheral, existence, with those affiliated with the Old Era now rendered redundant and without work. The author recollected the memories of actors, extras, writers, filmmakers and other associated with Old Era films. Today, many of whom live anonymously, and often carry other professions. With the collected recollections, the author has hoped to construct a narrative which explores ideas of abruptness, imperfection, resemblance, memory, and remembering and forgetting.

A group of professional translators and interpreters of various languages enter into the author’s settings, which he generated for them to convey what was written here a while ago. An email invite was sent a week earlier, the few that replied came. They partook in the process of mediation between the artist’s intention and the meaning of the work, between form and context and, language and image. The procedure begins: the observing author is present with his camera as they enter one after the other. They breathe and stare away; hold the papers that are distributed to them; blink as they read what must be read; eat the sandwiches that are served; drink the water that is poured in cups for everyone; wait remaining unmoving; and, exit as they came. In the afternoon, participants leave the told narrative. The author however continues to practice his observation in a conceived space of no doors or windows.

Author attempted to replicate his thinking space in other spaces of production. Here, the artist invited athletes to temporarily inhabit his studio space where no physical action had taken place otherwise. Therefore, the space that had produced no creation visible to others, and had remained stilled and inactive, became a site of production with introduction of outsiders. The group's initial movements are abrupt but calculated as in the author's intended narrative. As this narrative is told, the author observes it play out through a camera he holds next to him. The athletes stand and work; sweat and breathe; eat and swallow; and they repeat.

A group gathers as the other arrives. One must inform the other, it has been so ordained. Yet, the one who ordained so – the initiator – is not present. And so they wait: unsure, unmoving, still. The initiator is withdrawn from making of his own work to allow his participants to both create and witness creation. To witness creation, the participants must wait, and they must cover a distance – a distance that equals the distance between them and the initiator. And as they wait, the initiator, too waits. And as they wonder, the initiator hopes – he hopes that participants will create and shall carry creation to him. The work now begins. Participants gather in a group; lift personal belongings of the initiator to carry towards him; unsure, unmoving, still. They leave. -- Under the high arches of Lahore’s railway station, trudge about its Kullis. The Kullis were luggage-carriers and porters in England, and came to Lahore when the British brought railways to the Indian subcontinent in the 1800s. Here, the porters shed their skin, became Indian, put on red shirts which sew numbers into their bodies, and became Coolies. In the far old age of 1947’s summer, the British stopped flagging their own trains, and left the subcontinent. The Coolies, now, became Kullis. Soon, the trains stopped breathing smoke, electric wires webbed over the Kullis ̧ and their skins oranged. The author worked with the Kullis of Lahore’s railway station, whom he saw and observed while growing up in the same city. He saw the Kullis as persons who move but do not go. To make the work, author only sent the instructions. The work was made in the absence of the author, who was away waiting for the work to be made and delivered.

The author at the present time is contemplating the story of murder which goes back to a conflict between the two sons of Adam and Eve: Abel and Cain. Cain killed Abel and thus committed the first murder in the history of humankind. When Cain killed Abel, God was both the only witness and the prosecution; and was, at once, the judge and the jury. And at the time, the witness gave testimony; the prosecution prosecuted; the jury deliberated; the judge ruled; and Cain was condemned. The condemnation has reverberated through time – as has the act itself and its implications. Muhammad, the founder of Islam, once remarked: "No soul is wrongfully killed except that some of the burden falls upon the son of Adam, for he was the first to establish the practice of murder." Whereas Muhammad, in this quote, constructs attribution and, perhaps by some stretch of imagination, a chain of blame, there is need to return to the original act of murder itself, and reinterpret it to construct new meanings. “Practicing Procedures of Killing” looks at the first murder in the history to establish the possible last murder on earth and all the others in-between. For the two-channel installation, the author invited young actors to reenact the story of the first murder. Participants were given instructions in a Waiting Room, where they were videotaped as they spoke, waited, ate, rehearsed and left. In the Recording Room, the participants (two at a time) narrated the story in an improvised manner and in so doing, become a part of the story itself in reenacting it. Here, the camera only recorded the end of their performances wherein the participants, unmoving, try to hold their breath so that their death may be established. However, the author continued to observe natural behavior of the participants’ bodies with the help of the camera.

On July 25, 2014, I received an email telling me that Bakary Diallo was on the plane that crashed in Mali. It was just two days before my flight. I was traveling to begin my artist’s residency with Bakary at the Sacatar Institute on Itaparica Island in Bahia, Brazil. After that news, it was very tough for me to take the flight. Traveling from Lahore to Itaparica had the strongest impact on me. I was not at all thinking about the work I would be doing during my residency. I think that, for a time, art wasn’t important to me. I had questions for myself, with no answers to any of them. I work with the situations I am in – this has been one of my strategies for sustaining freshness in my work – and that situation was too strong for me to ignore. I realized that perhaps I had already begun making the work; from the time I left home. I was the first fellow to arrive at the residency house. I had three days to stay in the house alone, absorbing everything I had experienced while the staff was getting ready for the other fellows to arrive. I’ve always had this curiosity about the day I die. What would the next day look like? I try to imagine how people I know would receive the news. How would they react? Would everything else be the same? Perhaps yes. The sorrow that exists in this idea interests me - and the grief in the day, the day I will never see. This situation was a chance for me to put myself into such a state of nonbeing, to make a sort of afterlife for myself. In the process, soon the staff in the house became my actors, standing still and trying not to blink. This work is in memory of Bakary and me.

A lone man stares, and beyond the curtain of a moment, a group of people stare back, creating a dialogue between the single man and the group. The instant of sustained gazing and unbroken vision continues to become still, and to become true. The narrative asks whether it is the lone subject or the group of people which holds the tension in the moment. As the staring eyes, only sometimes covered in blinks, continue to stare, the moment loses itself. The people in the group take off their clothes, and dissolve into the stymied flow of the moment they are in, merging into the color of clothes that they were wearing. They, then, put their clothes back on again. What has fused, separates: the individual subject continues to stand still and listen to the birdsong that sustains its silent resonance in the background. As an artist, I like to keep shifting my position in relation to my subject. With "Power Between Weak" I wanted to establish my point of view before approaching the work, and later decided I wanted to approach from the position of “the other”. I worked with a group of people who belong Pakistan’s small Christian community, an often persecuted religious minority which comprises just 1.6 percent of the population of Pakistan, a country that has divisive cleavages along the lines of religious beliefs. My work essentially rests between my narrative and its narration by my subjects, on the one hand, and on the other, between the fictional situation of subjects’ presence in a decrepit room and the reality of my subjects as it was, and as it became in relation to the new context that was generated for them for the purpose of this work. I write my own fiction, which I base on my observation of everyday life. I use the construction of my fiction to document changes in social landscapes around me. In this respect, I take people who are not professional actors to act out roles as I set for them in my projects, my purpose being to bring people and often simple, but metaphorically meaningful,situations together, and observing their reconciliation.

While driving home one day in Lahore, I came across the "Bismillah Driving Center," a local driving school. The name "Bismillah" is an Arabic phrase meaning "in the name of God." While it holds deep religious significance, it is also commonly used in everyday contexts to mark the beginning of any task. The video captures a staged first driving lesson, featuring a novice driver with no prior experience handling a car’s gears and pedals. The scene is set in a modest, even rudimentary environment, where both the car and the instructor suggest a training experience that is far from polished. The lesson unfolds with a humorous repetitiveness, as the instructor continuously instructs the driver to press the accelerator and release the clutch pedal. This repetition creates a comical contrast between the lesson’s serious tone and the chaotic reality that ensues. The viewer, positioned as a silent observer in the backseat, witnesses a disorganized session where the driver slowly gains confidence without actually improving the control. The lesson takes place in an unfinished and deserted housing society in Lahore, a place seemingly waiting for life to begin—yet life never did within its empty streets.

I worked in collaboration with a person from a different background to set-up a situation that treads the thin line between fiction and reality. He brought in his relatives, friends and acquaintances, none of whom I knew and all of whom were alien to me, for a celebration, the name or title, occasion and purpose of which is never revealed to the participants. I accorded my contact, who had gathered these people together, the role of an architect, who directed much of what was being done by the gathered people and how it was being done. By bringing these people together I wanted to build a basic structure which is filled up and extended by the little gestures of the people, and which, in turn, creates for the viewer a social situation – which, in this case, is the narrative of a celebration – from within which to understand the structure of human interaction. The end result of this project was quite unexpected. Initially, I wanted to put together a social gathering so as to study the interaction between individuals. However, I feel, I probably I broke the structure I wanted to build, by positioning myself with a camera. The camera put the participants ill at ease. Thus, what appears in the video is a group of aliens who are even unknown to each other.

‘In a Move, to the Better Side’, is inspired by a true incident. This took place in 2011, in Pakistan. A group of people wanted to immigrate to Europe in search of a better life. They were hidden in a container, and somewhere on the journey, a long way from home, their bodies were discovered. All had died of suffocation. I interpreted this incident using three basic elements: weight, movement and repetition. Weight as ideology, movement as hope to reach a better side and repetition as belief or ritual. These three elements hold the work together. What made them move? Did the object move them or did their ideology make it move? The repetition represents their stubborn belief in the possibility of change and the efficacy of movement. This becomes an end in itself. My arrival and first experience of Europe triggered my interest in this incident. Perhaps my own brief ‘move to a better side’ made me more than an observer? This question helped me to position myself to formalize the work. From here I started to look at the incident not from out side but from inside. I replaced suffocation with openness and movement with stillness.

In a fishermen’s settlement that no longer exists, I stayed awhile, and I saw the horizon turned crimson red by daybreak and the sheet of the sea dyed in purple hues by evening. I watched a fisherman haul out his boats when the sand glowed gold, and I saw him haul his boat in as the horizon broke into a thousand glimmering mirrors reflecting sunlight. I realized how dependent the fishermen were on the sea for their livelihood, and I resolved to create a dialogue between men and the sea. It was thus that I developed the idea for “A Message to the Sea." I tried to facilitate the intended dialogue by sending a message back to the sea. The video work shows a fisherman sending out a message to the sea: a boat that is set off to sail into the distant horizon until it disappears, signifying the receipt and assimilation of the message. This work is a remembrance of a profession that no longer exists. A boat is the channel through which a fisherman interacts with the sea, a source of livelihood that, in turn, sustains his life. I pose questions of belonging and dependence upon the surroundings to explore the connection between man and his surroundings, between life and that which sustains it, and the interaction that makes both a singular whole.

Video ‘Gehen wir nach Hause (Lets Go Home)’ came out of a video clip, which was taken during a protest in Berlin, Germany. Work is a response to a gesture of walk as a collective expression of disapproval or objection to action or words, which symbolize as a move towards a better side. Video is in reverse audio and video to find an opposite meaning of a same act.