About

Haadi is a visual artist working in video and animation, based between Lahore and Richmond, Virginia. His work is concerned with land politics, post-colonial history, and the way the state treats its own peripheries. He researches these questions in the margins of Pakistan, in places far from the center that are often overlooked.

Objects are central to this. Haadi brings together objects from different places, some found in cities and some far outside them, and places them in relation to each other. Each carries its own history, but side by side they create new meanings and contexts. Objects also give him a way around censorship. When a problem can’t be addressed directly, he lets objects say it for him.

Haadi came to animation through painting and still treats it that way. For him, animation is another way of painting rather than a sequence of drawn frames. It adds two more dimensions to the painting, movement and sound.

He has exhibited at Twelve Gates Arts in Philadelphia, the Anderson Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and the National Art Gallery in Islamabad. He took part in Where Soft Blades Meet, a group exhibition organized by the Lahore Biennale Foundation, and in Art Exchange, a moving image exhibition by the British Council and Lux Awards. He completed the Home Is Horizon residency at Art Articulate in Lahore, and has shown work at the Lahore Digital Festival, Haam Gallery and the Faiz Festival.

Haadi taught at the National College of Arts, Lahore, for two years, and is now a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Virginia Commonwealth University. He holds a bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the National College of Arts and is pursuing a master’s in Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.