Recent Work
22 Words
Video installation, 8 minutes, 2023
As a father teaches Urdu (national language of Pakistan) words to his daughter, what starts off like a language lesson intended for a 6-year-old, reveals something deeper, hinting at themes of cultural loss, immigrant life and the father's longing to belong.
Watch 3-minute excerpt:
The Unrequited Love Institute
Multi-room interactive installation, 2025
The Unrequited Love Institute stages a fictional bureaucracy of belonging. Visitors take a number to being their “belonging process,” fill out intake forms, and watch an orientation video that promises clarity but delivers delay. The wait time is measured in decades, echoing my nineteen-year path through the U.S. immigration system.
Watch an excerpt from the institute’s orientation video:
Comfort Food
Custom made wood box, media player, headphones and recipe cards, 2025
Comfort Food is a recipe box. It looks like the kind of box someone might use to store family recipes. Inside are recipe cards for foods I call “comfort foods.” They are written as recipes but function as stories, advice, and memories for my children. Some are practical. Some are personal. All of them are meant to be something they could return to later. The box also includes an audio story I made with my daughter and uses some of the recipes and talks about cooking together, and how making food became a way for us to show care for each other.
My Mother’s Voice(mails)
Four-channel video (16 minutes 34 seconds), 200-page spiral bound report, 2025
This is a two-part work built from 12 years of voicemails left by my mother. The first part is a 200-page, spiral-bound report formatted like a corporate document. It analyzes every voicemail through charts and data, alongside full transcripts of the messages, which were originally recorded in Punjabi and Urdu. Over time, the report shows a growing distance between us, as her queries shift from my daily life to my partner and then to my children.
The second part is a four-channel, 16-minute video presented as a Zoom meeting between employees of The Unrequited Love Institute. They discuss whether a report like this should be made public or kept internal, treating a family archive as an institutional risk.
Anxieties of an Immigrant Father
Series of 56 drawings, charcoal and oil pastel on printed paper, 10” x 10” each, 2022 - 2025
For the past eight years, I've been documenting my anxieties about being a parent through a series of charts. Addressed to my daughter, the anxieties rise and fall based on my daughter’s age as I make assumptions about whether something will make me less or more anxious in the future.
Number of the Day: 7,103
Oil pastel on black paper roll and the nylon American flag I received at my naturalization ceremony, 230” x 60”, 2025
Using my own experience of going through a 19-year-long immigration process, “Number of the Day: 7,103” was developed as a learning tool to teach my daughter how to count. The tally marks represent the number of days I spent in the US immigration system before becoming a naturalized citizen. As my daughter counts to 7,103, we explore the meaning of time, being separated from family and what it means to wait for something you really want.
The Self-Help Library
Series of 54, custom-made hardbound books, 2021 - 2025
A collection of 50, oddly specific self-help books that I wish had existed to help me become a better parent, man, citizen, worker and anything else needed to succeed as an immigrant trying to make home in the American Southwest.
Oral History (of Us)
Audio installation, 4 minutes, 2022 - 2025
My mother speaks to me in Punjabi, but I respond back to her in Urdu. I speak to my daughter in Urdu, but she responds back in English. My mother and my daughter do not communicate in any verbal language – just smiles, hugs and food. Over the course of just one generation, Punjabi is a lost language in my family. Despite my best effort to get my daughter to take an interest in it, Urdu, along with the culture I grew up with, might not be a part of my daughter’s life. Oral History (of Us) invites the audience to listen to a phone call addressed to my daughter, covering a few centuries of our history.
How to eat your cake and have it too
Video installation, 3 minutes, 2022
A father and daughter work together to make cake, a western dessert, but make the cake their own by using Pakistani flavors like cardamom, rose water, saffron and pistachios. Filmed to look like an instructional video, the cake making visuals are juxtaposed with audio instructions on how to successfully colonize a land to create a lasting and guilt-free legacy of oppression.
