Language: English / Urdu

  • Video Home System

    ‘Video Home System’ traces the convergence of popular culture and politics in Pakistan during the 1980s and 1990s. This video showcases the connections between pop culture and nationalism, and how bootleg economies kept the cinema industry alive during periods of censorship. Image description: A young man sits at a desk behind a pile of VHS tapes, illuminated by a desk lamp. The wall behind him is vivid green.

  • The Translation is Approximate

    This video focuses a conversation that Naqvi witnessed between her aunt and a domestic worker over financial matters. For many reasons — the ambivalence of the situation, the respective socioeconomic positions of the two women involved in the scene, and the very nature of the recording, which careened between documentary and voyeurism — these images have long haunted Naqvi. In the Translation is Approximate (2021), Naqvi retrieves the original footage that she shot in 2013 and traces back her thoughts about what motivated her to revisit this material. This short video both provides insight into her approach and fundamentally questions…

  • Seaview

    Seaview (2015) is an experimental film which combines home video and captured footage from Karachi, Pakistan. Naqvi travels back to her family’s country of origin to compare childhood memories of this place with lived experience. In the first sequence, she shows video footage of her first trip to Clifton Beach in Karachi. The accompanying text describes her visit to the same beach seventeen years later, and the difficulties in trying to document this place, both as an image maker and as a woman. Naqvi confronts her own personal struggle of being caught between the ideals of Western and Eastern societies.…