yaminay chaudhri. solo and collaborative work

Yaminay Chaudhri, Tentative Collective 1

Yaminay Chaudhri. Solo and Collaborative Work2010-2015

Yaminay Chaudhri. Wall Fragments, Karachi. Mobile phone digital images. Work in progress

Untitled (2015)7 min Video Projection (for Tentative Collective). Bahria Icon Tower Karachivideo stillYaminay Chaudhri, Tentative Collective 2

Untitled (2015)7 min Video Projection (for Tentative Collective). Bahria Icon Tower KarachidocumentationYaminay Chaudhri, Tentative Collective 3

Yaminay Chaudhri, Tentative Collective 4Yaminay Chaudhri and Mahera Omar

narrative interrupted (2014) A collaborative video project with Mahera Omar (forthcoming)

Before dawn on a September morning, a crew of 10 hide from security to paint a beached ship gold. The ship had washed up from the Indian Ocean onto Seaview dur-ing the monsoon. Various narratives about where it came from and what was going to happen to it correlated with narratives of migration, hope, disappointment and stories generated about places at the brink of abandonment.


Separation’s Geography (2014)documentation from installation at Dreamscape, 2014

Separation’s Geography


Separation’s Geography (2014)Light box


Yaminay Chaudhri, Tentative Collective 7Separation’s Geography



Separation’s Geography (2014)Reading ‘list’



Separation’s Geography (2014)reading



Untitled Maps of Darakshan (2015)Works in progress for publication, ‘Radical Cartographies’

Untitled Maps of Darakhshan

Yaminay Chaudhri, Tentative Collective 13Untitled Maps of Darakhshan

Yaminay Chaudhri, Tentative Collective 14Untitled Maps of Darakhshan

Yaminay Chaudhri, Tentative Collective 15Home

Home 300 postcards distributed to strangers and friends in Upstate New York and Vermont asking them to write to me about home and belonging.


Meeting With Strangers (2011)2 channel video installation, directional sound. 00:12:39This video documents my initial conversations with complete strangers. Selected here, Chief Paul Delaughter of the United States Navy, based in Boston MA, and Mohibba Fatima a

homesick expatriate Pakistani who now lives in Albany, NY. The conversations offered win-dows into the worlds of these individuals and their concept of nationality. Their longing for imagined and ideal homes was projected on the viewer positioned somewhere in between disjointed mirrors.

Yaminay Chaudhri, Tentative Collective 17Home

Home slideshow of family photos collected from people as most reminiscent memories of home were overlaid with audio responses received from the Home postcard project.

Yaminay Chaudhri, Tentative Collective 18Tumbleweed- Banjaran

Yaminay Chaudhri, Tentative Collective 19Untitled cell phone pictures


Loss About longing for my mother in Upstate New York

In the dead of February, underneath a knee deep layer of crackling leaves, I buried four sources of audio that were timed to play preserved telephone conversations on rotary phones in Karachi; my mother, the cook and I singing for the recorder, my father speaking to telephone operators, the BBC reporting some crisis in the 80s...The listener could never hear the voices no matter what was tried. Standing still was far away. The act of searching unsettled the ground and drowned out any traces.


Changing the Demographic (May 6, 2011)00:60:00At 6:30 pm sharp, as part of my MFA thesis work at the University at Albany Art Museum I organized an invitation of 50 ‘aunties’ (from the South Asian diaspora in Albany) who changed the demographic of the museum by 30%.

This migration of women from their spaces of comfort to a contained space for art changed the tone of the museum for a short time.

Yaminay Chaudhri, Tentative Collective 24A Pakhtun Memory

Tentative Collective Team: Rasheed Khan, Mohammad Saddique Khan, Pakhtun Band from BanarasDirection: Yaminay Chaudhri

A last dance at the roundabout. Video screened at Syracuse International Film Festival. Winner of Mohawk Hudson Regional Curator Prize. Nato Thompson. Forthcoming at CityPossible III, Asia Research Institute, Na-tional University of Singapore 2014.

A Pakhtun Memory (December 28, 2011)Documentary video 00:14:34

This video documents an art intervention that temporarily privileged a marginalised population of migrants in an unplanned settlement of Karachi by using music. Referencing works by other artists like Jens Haaning’s Turkish Jokes (1994), which inverted power relations in a square in Oslo, the Tentative Collective used the memory of ethnically specific folk tunes on an urban roundabout for a displaced rural population to see how ownership of the space might change. Issues of belonging, and the performativity of bodies in ‘public’ space were explored. The homog-enized media perceptions of Pakhtun culture were challenged and the layered nature of public spaces by class, ethnicity and security were revealed.


A conversation with policemen at the site of our intervention. Shirin Jinnah Colony Roundabout.

(POLICE)

This is not a place to celebrate happiness.

Why don’t you celebrate at home?

A Pakhtun Memory


Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema (November 2012 - 2014)www.TentativeCollective.com

This collaborative mobile cinema project has set up free screenings in various parts of Karachi, using homemade cell phone videos and a rickshaw powered projector. We collaborate with resi-dents of various colonies across the city to gather videos in response to, ‘What do you in your free time?’ This project encourages participants to produce self generated media using locally available vernacular technology. A series of free screening events in the everyday urban spaces of the neighborhoods where the videos are made then forge connections between people, cre-ating opportunities for dialogue with strangers, transforming expectations of public and private space, and creating new types of conviviality. The Mobile Cinema Rickshaw was designed using the local vernacular of transportation and decoration in mind. It is recognizable yet odd, becom-ing a metaphor for the re-thinking of existing spaces and identities. We project on the vertical landscape of walls and facades that define Karachi, tinkering with its opacities and the invisible spaces enveloped around them.Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema works within the voids and opportunities provided by the tenta-tive nature of Karachi as a complex—unstable, sometimes failing and often productive—urban landscape.

Tentative Collective Team: Nausheen H. Anwar, Zebunissa Ahmad (Haidery community leader), Khadija Abdul Lateef, Krishna Raju, Sadia Khatri, Talha Sabri, Mohammad Saddique Khan. Ashfaque. Fawwad, Himmat and Fazal Kolachi (community leaders at Cantt Railway Station). Bashir photographer (sea view waterfront community leader) Kiran School (Lyari community leaders), Raja Sabri (engineer), Farhad Mirza, Cyrus Viccaji (video editor for sea view).Project direction: Yaminay Chaudhri

screening sitesIbrahim Haidery: Burmese-Rohingya and Bengali fishing neighborhood.

Cantt Railway Station: British colonial train station. Main thor-oughfare for domestic travel. We worked with migrant Sindhi coolies (porters) and projected on the trains and colonial build-ings as part of a Karachi art festival.

Sea View waterfront: the most popular public park of the city. We worked with migrant Baloch, Sindhi, Pakhtun and Seraiki vendors whose businesses included photography services and all terrain vehicle rides. (screenings took place on the site of an abandoned restaurant shaped like a giant ship)

Lyari: Close to the heart of the city, this is Karachi’s most densely populated neighborhood and one with a reputation for the most violence. Its communities are diverse but dominated by Baloch, Shiddi, Kachhi and Muhajir (migrant). The vertical landscape is complex, vibrant, and politically volatile. We worked with 10 kids who were mostly Baloch.

Defence Housing Society T2F cultural cafe: a rich suburb of Kara-chi. We projected in the empty lot adjacent to the cafe.We worked with teenagers from the suburb along with our friends and nearby shop owners.

Children’s Literature Festival Karachi: (20,000 children attended this event. on site workshop with 4 kids from Haidery, 1 from Defence and 1 from Lyari.

Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema


About the wall that we project on

Walls are palimpsests of local epistemes. They have been used to separate and create social and discursive binaries. In Karachi, a former British colony, the wall partitions and polices, yet, it is also a productive document that stores information about the complexity of each neighborhood and the projections of order that are called upon to make the city ‘function’. This project disrupts the wall to try to excavate invisible spaces and project new meanings on our vertical landscape.


Yaminay Chaudhri, Tentative Collective 28Mera Karachi Mobile CinemaScreening documentation on Cantt Station and Haidery


March 15, 2014. Sahil Aur Hum (the beach and us).The last screening on the Sea View waterfront attracted about 150 people. The participants included video producers from Cantt Station, video producers from the waterfront (and their families), other vendors on the beach, animals, all terrain vehicles, guests and their families. This was our most collaborative screening and the videos reflected several exchanges between people of different ethnicities who enjoyed working together.



Screening at T2F (the second floor) a cultural hub and cafe located in an affluent/ heavily securitized suburb of Karachi.Poorly attended and separated by class, this screening revealed the discomfort of informal gatherings in the public spaces of some of Karachi’s privileged neighborhoods.


yaminay chaudhri. solo and collaborative work

Documents