Sophia Balagamwala

Born in 1987 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Sophia Balagamwala is a Karachi-based artist, illustrator and curator. Her work draws from history, children’s books, political caricatures and animated films. She currently works at the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, and is the Lead Curator for National History Museum at the Greater Iqbal Park, Lahore. Her artistic practice explores the intersectional space in which history, fiction and nonsense converge. This derives from her interest in how stories are constructed, in particular, the myths of national heroes and national histories, and how these embody a subjective dialogue between so-called historical reality, apocrypha and mythification. These concerns find their way into Balagamwala’s practice through a visual language inspired by children’s books and political caricatures.

Hopes and Prospects epitomizes Balagamwala’s artistic practice, by presenting various caricatured candidates to the audience, each of whom is running to be elected as head of a fictional state. She presents each candidate in a gaudy television set, which seems to have come straight off the pages of an illustrated children’s book, creating a visual representation of each candidate’s ‘soap-box’. Balagamwala aptly describes the beauty and danger of caricature: “The humour of the caricature, in addition to acting as a metaphor and carrying a history of political critique can be deeply complex. Things have the liberty to get carried away, and to become abstracted and nonsensical.” The artist’s work for the Karachi Biennale masterfully walks this artistic tightrope, as each of the candidates present their hopes for the nation – but to the audience, these caricatures expounding their political spiel from their soapbox all sound interchangeable. The satirical brilliance of this sculptural caricature is that these candidates, their interchangeability and their meaningless rhetoric, seem all too familiar in our disillusionary contemporary political context.