Publications

Who do we speak of when we speak of ‘Pakistan’ and the ‘Pakistani’? This question was posed to more than eighty artists, designers, and other creative souls across Pakistan. They responded with maps, inventories, photographs and drawings that explored the multifaceted microcosm of their real and imagined lives. These investigations will take you through the labyrinths of cityscapes, hidden lairs beneath layers of domes, nationalist rants, fictional propaganda, and corporate deceptions.

This book revels in the unexpected and the overlooked, the hidden and the mysterious, the obscure and bizarre. Through these compelling contemporary cartographies, the Subjective Atlas of Pakistan offers a humanised vision of ongoing conflicts pacified through visual poetics of personal stories, fears, hopes and dreams. The maps, graphs, inventories, maps and drawings as a whole expose the consequences of political change, but discreetly, implicitly, and not as a goal. The publication show, above all, a complex reality that is often blinded by overly simplistic media images. This powerful series of alternative, copyright-free cartographies can serve as an inspiring, publicly available tool to critically question the apparently objective.