Umber Majeed

Born in 1989 in New York (USA)
Lives and works between New York and Lahore (Pakistan)

Umber Majeed completed her MFA from Parsons The New School for Design in 2016, having graduated from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan in 2013. Majeed has shown in venues throughout the world, including: The Slought Foundation, Philadelphia; Shirin Gallery, New York; The State Hermitage Museum, St.Petersburg; Queens Museum, New York; and apexart, New York. Her work has been acquired by several private collections, including the Lekha and Anupam Poddar Collection at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, India, and she recently completed the HWP fellowship at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, Lebanon. Majeed’s interdisciplinary practice is conceptually driven by physical and cultural displacement; and characterised by multi-cultural experience. As a result, her work is a manifestation of cultural hybridity, engaging with discourses surrounding migration, post-colonial confusion and definitions of political contentiousness. The fragmented perspective conspicuous within Majeed’s drawings, collages, and animations depicts the complexity of cultural identity, and the accompanying burden of misconception.

Atomi Daamaki Wali Mohabbat, Majeed’s work for the Karachi Biennale 2017, is an animation that chronicles the history of nuclear power in Pakistan compiled through national and familial archives. The disjointed and uncomfortable aesthetic perfectly dissects the history of nuclear testing in Pakistan, with Majeed using Chagi Monument Hill as a visual motif within a digital space to constitute a poignant moment in history. She furthers this by utilising flora as a symbolic representation of embedded violence, subverted by the hegemonic narration of a fictitious populist Urdu poet.