About

Taqi Shaheen is an artist, filmmaker, and game designer whose work explores media interfaces and alternative narratives in collaboration with grassroots communities. He researches the ecology of coastal cities and develops creative tools and games for learning about how alternative futures can be imagined, reinvented, and developed with diverse communities. His practice engages both analogue and digital tools, with a particular focus on oral histories and newly digitised visual records.

Recently, he developed Machi Wachi, an environmental strategy board game that draws on oral histories, testimonies, archives, and multigenerational stories from Karachi’s Indigenous fisherfolk communities. His publications include Subjective Atlas of Pakistan (Oxford University Press, 2020) and A People’s History of Karachi (forthcoming, 2026), which advance participatory research and cartographic methods while addressing themes of personhood, memory, and shared histories.

He works across mixed-media formats, researching and constructing artworks through on-site experiences, films, games, interactive exhibitions, and publications. His non-fiction film works include Lessons on Lessons (TMN, 2015), The Petman Girls (2012), Whose Pakistan Is It Anyway? (TMN, 2010), Morris Mata (2009), Kundun (ILO/BBC, 2004), and the animated short film Congregation of the Distressed (2005).

He has conducted creative workshops and exhibited his work internationally, including at Politecnico di Milano, Italy; the Media Architecture Biennale, Toronto; the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA), Hong Kong; the Himalayas Museum, Shanghai; the Digital Worlds Institute, USA; Karachi Literature Festival; Canvas Gallery; and Koel Gallery. In recent years, his work has been featured and published by BBC World, Routledge, Leonardo Journal (MIT Press), Oxford University Press, Brill, Dawn, and other print and digital publications.