Outpost is pleased to welcome new Cuts and Burns Resident Umber Majeed, who will receive assistance with her video project “Hypersurface of the Present”. “Hypersurface of the Present” is an animation on the feminist historicization of Pakistan as the first “Muslim nuclear state”. The speculative fiction subversively inverts the implication of women (citizens) as vessels to perpetuate state sanctioned notions of love, science, and nature. Using state and familial archives, the narrative proposes a phallic green cone as a stand in figure to replace a recently destroyed state monument, Chaghi Monument Hill. The video functions as an instruction manual both conceptually and structurally for citizens displaced from the Chaghi Monument Hill, a site used for male- dominated celebrations of “Youm e Takbeer”, a national holiday that commemorated the nuclear tests done in the 1990s. The fiction and choreography expels how the phallic green cone/green light is inherent and can be activated through our bodily cones (in the eye and ear), reproductive cones (within plant life), cones in digital space (modes of projection), and within theoretical physics to reconfigure the measurement of time-space. Green light functions as a mode of spirituality perpetuated and disseminated by Pakistani nationalism, Islamic orientalism, populist green screen interface, and light therapy.
Bio:
Umber Majeed (b. New York, 1989) is a multidisciplinary visual artist. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in 2016 and graduated from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan in 2013. In July 2017, she completed the HWP fellowship at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, Lebanon.
Majeed has shown in venues across Pakistan, North America, and Europe. Recent group exhibitions include; ‘The Divided Self’, The Slought Foundation, Philadelphia (2012), ‘Ornate Activate’, Shirin Gallery, New York (2015), and “The Museum: Within and Without”, The State Hermitage Museum, St.Petersburg, Russia (2015), “welcome to what we took from is the state”, Queens Museum, New York (2016), and ‘Promises to Keep’, apexart, New York (2017). Her work has been acquired by several private collections, including the Lekha and Anupam Poddar Collection at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, India. She is a member of the HHH Collective currently based in NY, USA.
From Spring 2018 to 2019, Majeed is an artist in residence at Lower East Side Printshop in NY, USA. She lives and works in New York, USA and Lahore, Pakistan.
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