"Aarzoo" is an Urdu word meaning wish, desire and longing. This series explores a collision of desires, discontent, and buoyancy. Pakistan reveals itself as a microcosm of global uncertainty. Its 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.
These diptychs are my attempt to navigate that fragile space, tracing the rhythms of a reality that is as unsettling as it is profoundly human.
These pictures were taken between 210 and 2025.
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 theaters shadows answer each other while outside the society is burning, a peremptory finger on a wall of a military family hall in Quetta undermines the dreams of fame of a hijra who languidly poses in front of the gate of a film studio in Lahore in the hope of being cast.
These deconstructed and reconstructed images weave new 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.
Time somehow stands still, space is saturated with memories and untold tales, walls stare, and people walk by. These pictures have been taken between January 2010 and December 2023.