Pop-up Memories

“I speak of my relationship with my city as well as a time that has passed. I do this by living through my own memories,through photographic images from my family albums and the memories of a generation that lived through that time,” she says. “To me,these represent an imagined alternative,a place that I may not have experienced but one that I imagine and reinvent through these documentations,” she adds.

In many of the works on display are cut-outs and images of men and women that could well be from old family albums that the Karachi-based artist talks about. However,not all of them are. In a digital print,Just friends,the man and woman shaking hands are characters taken from an old film publicity photograph and “may be actors”. The woman in another digital print,titled I’ll be around,standing with her arms folded and apparently gazing at a red curtain,however,is Mundrawala’s mother. A third,the man in the digital print Lawrence Gardens Rendezvous who also appears in the pop-up work Temporal Debris,is “a by-stander in an official photograph taken when my father was working for a bank”,she says. “I do not pick characters for my works because of who they are,but rather for their postures and what they contribute to the narrative,” explains Mundrawala,who also teaches at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture,Karachi.