Yaminay N. Chaudhri

Born in 1979 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works between Karachi and Guilford, CT (USA)

Yaminay N. Chaudhri has a degree in architecture from Cornell University and worked as an architect for six years before making a career switch. She got her MFA in combined media studio arts from State University of New York at Albany and then moved back to Karachi where she established the Tentative Collective in 2011. Since then, she has been making work collaboratively as well as on her own, focusing on digital media and socially engaged practice. She has attended the Vermont Studio Centre and Jentel artist residencies. Her individual and collaborative work have been shown in various museums, galleries and festivals internationally including Gandhara Artspace (Karachi), Twelve Gates Arts (Philadelphia), University Art Museum (Albany), Kunstraum Bethanien (Berlin), Syracuse International Film Festival, Digital Marrakech Festival, City Possible Film Festival (Singapore), IAWRT Asian Women's Film Festival (New Delhi), among others.

Yaminay N. Cahudhri’s submissions for KB17 include a 7-minute video, salvaged text from real estate advertisements, and a series of digital prints entitled “What is separation's geography? Everything is just that mystery." Of her prints, one of which is pictured here, the artist states: “The title of this series of prints comes from a book of poems by Agha Shahid Ali, Rooms Are Never Finished. It conjures up the viscerality of separation and distance from home, from the perspective of a poet in exile. In the context of this series of prints, the separation referred to is more local but the implied distance may be as vast. Before the viewer are profiles of large suburban homes filled with the textures and details of their walls. Floating in fields of white, the flattening of these homes and removal from their original contexts offer meditations on distance, separation, and perspectives of living in Karachi.”