"Aarzoo" is an Urdu word meaning wish, desire and longing. This series explores a collision of desires, discontent, and buoyancy. Pakistan's fractured political, social, and environmental systems mirror the fragility of our age, the slow accumulation of countless, often imperceptible fragments of chaos, whose sum is ultimately explosive.
These images document the hardships and the sparks of resilience, which cut through the shadows like a distant yet vivid sun filtering through tightly closed shutters, the magical room of souls that wear down and resist.
The lost smile of a politician rotting on a wall in Lahore reappears in Peshawar amid the remains of a butcher shop, the plastic peeling faces of two princely dressed infants face the promises of "paradise", in theatres shadows answer each other while outside society is burning. Elsewhere, a child passes by, his balloon smiling, while Iqbal, Pakistan's most celebrated poet, languishes on the side of a rickshaw.
Life abounds, generous, rough, implacable.
These deconstructed and reconstructed images weave alternative scenes. They suggest stories; they constitute a track game through an often rough but poetic reality. They address the collective narrative through a gaze that covers some tracks and hints at others. These diptychs are an attempt to trace the rhythms of a reality that is as unsettling as it is profoundly human.
Pakistan, 2010 / 2025.