Madiha Aijaz

Born in 1981 in Multan (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Madiha Aijaz works with photography, film and fiction. A recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, she holds an MFA in Photography & Related Media from Parsons – The New School for Design. Her photographic work on Hindu temples in Pakistan was published in, Historic Temples in Pakistan – A Call to Conscience, in 2014. She is currently developing a documentary feature on travelling fairs and performers in Pakistan, in collaboration with film-maker Maheen Zia, which has received support from Locarno’s Open Doors Programme and the IDFA Bertha Fund. Aijaz works as an Assistant Professor at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi. Aijaz’s art practice explores the liminal zone between fiction and reality that the camera, as a vehicle of representation, often accords. Photographically, she aims to read and transpose the instinctual unconsciousness in its unfolding, simultaneously investigating the veracity and theatricality of her subject, imbuing her work with a veristic equivocality that corresponds to our own ocular experience of the world.

Aijaz’s work for the Karachi Biennale 2017 studies the public libraries of Karachi and the librarians who have been obstinately holding the fort at such institutions whilst the context of the city has transformed, in many cases, around them. This emphasis on the librarians themselves provides an insight into the migrant communities of the city, as well as the aging intelligentsia – many of whom are bastions of a foregone era. Such a study, working in a combination of photography, film and text, is also a reading of the shifting context that has shaped the content in the libraries; the content being a tangible barometer of the city’s cultural trajectory throughout the years. The work itself is part of the fabric of the shelves in the Theosophical Society’s Library, one of the oldest public libraries that remains in Karachi, with publications dating back to the 1890s, perfectly consummating Aijaz’s concept and its realisation, with the artwork becoming a part of the library.