“I have had parallel practices, as an artist/researcher and Lecturer in Fine Art consistently since 1996, first in Pakistan and since 2015, in the UK. These paths sometimes support each other, but often collide and are in conflict. I work between these spaces, to investigate borders or what is possible, take risks with material and ideas, within the realms of sculptural installation, photography, collage and drawing, sometimes sound and moving image. Drawing on the city as both site and subject, collective memory, globalisation, migration and fragmented histories, are both biographical and lived experiences as well as theoretical curiosities. I think of artworks as time keepers, marking emotional histories, witnessing the sorrowful, the futile and the funny. The works, like myself stand as inconvenient witnesses to time and place, critically exploring material & form. Doubt and uncertainty, have coalesced into an understanding of this skepticism as an intention, a deliberated position, across the plural worlds that I inhabit. The most recent work using my breath to blow glass that burns the wood that hosts it, remaining fragile despite its ability to take the heat of a kiln, is an important metaphor for strength in vulnerability, of care and of exiled bodies.”
Visit Huma’s website here
Autumn 2026
Visual Arts / Sculpture / Painting / Installation / Film/Video / Audio / Digital Practice / Drawing / Multidisciplinary Practice
Research Focus
I was born in Karachi and moved to Lahore in 2002, and the UK in 2015. Having lived most of my life, in a Muslim majority country, born out of a colonial partition, a peripheral, complex and paradoxical relationship, of both love and hate, with the centre, has been a constant process of negotiation for me as a citizen and an artist. In the 70s, the military rule of General Zia ul Haq, moved Pakistan’s alliance away from a South Asian identity, away from India, the “Hindu” South Asian big brother of the region, to an Arab identity, via religious alliance with the middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia. Neither of these identities have ever quite fit Pakistan or myself, having been raised in a Shia Muslim household, a minority within this orthodox alliance. As an art student, I wrote a dissertation on what it means to take this eclectic position as an artist, and in 2008, I made a work called “Arabian Delight” which addressed this discomfort with forced Arabisation. When I moved to the Bristol in 2015, I found myself curious about and in surprising alliance with the Irish, a sisterhood of a Catholic/ Muslim, within the backdrop of English dominance, in language, education, ambition, critique. What struck me the most was that our critiques were similar, our common distrust of the state, subversive humour, food, and more recently, a deep solidarity with the Palestinian cause, surrounded by polite liberal leftism of the English, where there isn’t a resonant space of collective solidarity and emotive mourning. I find myself again in the position of a sceptic and optimistic witness, both observer and participant, a fragmented, plural world view.
In this residency I will focus on an idea that relates to the Museum as a Site of Vibration, and The Irish Paradigm. When Trump offered the world a visual of a French riviera in Gaza, despite our horror, the possibility manifested itself in our minds. I have been thinking about why we took a defensive position, unable to offer, to imagine, an equally clear world WE wanted to see that we could manifest in minds across the world. up. Perhaps a crisis of imagination? How can we bring new worlds into being, a future for Palestine, and the world, faced with an ecological emergency and a genocide. I am interested in Edouard Glissant’s ideas (and Manthia Diawara’s elaboration) on the Archipelago and Opacity (Poetics of Relation), the right to be illegible to the other and to think through what it might mean to “live together with difference” today, as we face new challenges of climate migration and an increasingly divisive political environment. I am also interested in dissent and disobedience as an artistic method, subversive humour, as attitude or form. As a sculptor, I want to think about what happens when a bulldozer refuses to do what it is designed to do and does something else. Can we imagine a reprogramming of machines. Time spent in Berlin last year, allowed me to begin to think of some of these ideas of dissent, disobedience, through collective creative imagination with others. At the residency at IMMA, I would like to activate these ideas through conversations and drawings that will eventually result in a publication of blueprints for a future.
More about the Dwell Here Residency
Dwell Here offers participants a simple proposition: to commit to this time and place while thinking deeply about its urgencies. Together we are curious to learn what can be activated or challenged through the process of dwelling. IMMA encourages reflection across the following themes to consider geographical, historical, political and cultural concepts of Ireland as a starting point to expand and connect international contexts through similarities and differences:
Technologies of Peace – to consider commemorative landscapes and memories of peace (as a dream, movement, or value) while generating perspectives on sustainable coexistence.
The Irish Paradigm – Welcomes artistic research that creates intimacy and connections, while celebrating the perceived agility and freedoms of operating on the periphery. As a small island on the edge of Europe, Ireland often has a challenging relationship with ‘the centre’.
The Museum as a Site of Vibration – consider how the museum and site can create new vibrations and rhythms within the built legacy of empire. How can museums make visible cultural shifts, including erased, censored or marginalised histories, as well as sustainability, planetary care, sharing and hospitality.