Work in Progress – MFA Research-Creation Project

This project began with a moment in the Lahore Museum, standing before 17th-century Mughal portraits of same-sex lovers. Their tenderness was unmistakable. As a queer person of the South Asian diaspora, I have learned to navigate how, when, and where I express my queerness, especially around family in rural Punjab. Seeing queerness openly depicted in Mughal art challenged the idea that queerness is new, foreign, or separate from my cultural lineage.

Yet these histories are not well-preserved. Traces of sapphic desire appear in rekhti poetry, miniature paintings, and whispered stories, but they are fragmented and shaped by colonial repression and patriarchal gatekeeping. My work asks: How can we remember what the archive has forgotten or erased? How might art allow us to listen for what survives in the gaps?

This installation uses research-creation to reimagine erased sapphic relationships from the Mughal era. The work consists of four interconnected elements:

• A 35-panel cyanotype based on a photograph of two women dancing in flowing lehngas, inspired by Mughal portraiture and shared gesture.
• Two suspended fabric forms that evoke the presence of dancing bodies and relational movement.
• Abstract Urdu calligraphy translating rekhti poetry, allowing intimacy to be felt through texture, rhythm, and mark.
• A layered soundscape of footsteps, whispers, and poetry, suggesting the nearness of ancestors whose stories were never fully recorded.

My project is guided by Saidiya Hartman’s framework of critical fabulation, which merges historical research and creative narration to reimagine lives erased or misrepresented in the archive.

Ultimately, this project is about reclaiming lineage. It challenges the idea that queerness is outside South Asian culture, and instead illuminates the traces of queer intimacy that have always been there. By weaving image, movement, text, and sound, the installation becomes a space for connection, memory, and return — an alternative archive for what was fragmented, silenced, or unseen.