Artist Profile

Hira Nabi

hira nabi

Hira Nabi (b. 1987) is a filmmaker and multimedia artist. Her practice moves across research and visual production interrogating the relationship between memory and histories, witnessing and testimonies through image and narrative. Her work is concerned with apprehending the current ecological moment, and in expanding temporal qualities through cinema. Her most recent work is a study of the shipbreaking yard, and the migrant labourers working under exacting conditions at Gadani, in southwest Pakistan.

She earned an MA in cinema and media studies from The New School, and a BA in film/video and postcolonial studies from Hampshire College. She also worked with Rebeca Chavez in Havana, Cuba and with Abbas Kiarostami at EICTV (Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV) in Cuba. She lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan.

Featured Work

All That Perishes At The Edge Of Land

2019, 30 mins, Pashto, Pakistan

In this docu-fictional work, ‘Ocean Master’ a decommissioned container vessel is anthropomorphized, and enters into a  dialogue with several workers at the Gadani yards. The conversation moves between dreams and desire, the environment, places that can be called home, their own physical vulnerabilities, and the structural violence embedded in the act of dismembering a ship at  Gadani. As the workers recall the homes and families they left behind, the long workdays mesh indistinguishably into one another,  the desperation that they carry with them like shackles rises to the forefront, and they are forced to confront the realities of their work in which they are faced with death every day. How may they survive and look towards the future?