Drone Series
2 Minutes Read Time
Artist’s Statement
My primary interests include traditional folk-art forms, the politics of war, and artificial intelligence, as well as its implications within modern warfare. Drone series is inspired by my visit to Pakistan in 2011, and it involves two distinct yet contrasting visual elements: colorful and bright symbols and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aka drones. I create formal paintings that depict contradictions and irony within their pictorial coding. Starting from a silhouette of a UAV, I paint colorful folk “truck-art” imagery on these war machines to give them a second skin that opens a dialogue about present-day Pakistani culture.
These paintings are accompanied by culturally loaded text. Poetic expressions in combination with stark iconography give birth to a new visual language. In this process, I hope to make the foreign and distant appear familiar and intimate. My aesthetic practice defines new ways to disclose the unseen and unsaid of contemporary US global state violence. By applying photo-transferred images from Pakistani print media and layering them with traditional miniature painting, I challenge the grotesque reality of modern warfare.
More recently, I am creating installations that interact with the space and the viewer. I am interested in the juxtaposition of terror with the representation of cultural beauty.
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