Shalalae Jamil was born and raised in Karachi. She grew up surrounded by art through her mother’s home based painting studio and the early years of art and life combined to form the basis of her artistic practice many years later.  

Shalalae’s work is deeply personal and engages the social, the political and the spiritual directly from lived experience. The stories that emerge lend voice to some of the various ideological and cultural conflicts and oddities that shape contemporary life in South Asia and beyond.  

Shalalae is reticent to box herself into any one category or medium – her work ranges from photography and printmaking, into film and video, and is currently leaning towards public performances and street art.  She wants to remain fluid and continue to be inter-disciplinary in her approach. “I prefer being in the field of art versus being a dedicated photographer or film maker” she says. 

I found a voyeuristic quality to the work, where the sharing of intimate details comes at once as a privilege and an embarrassment. Candid disclosure of personal details is disarming, but is used repeatedly it seems, as a strategy for making work.   

I spoke to Shalalae at length about her journey, the work and her inspiration. 

A. First let's find out about your education and training in the field 

S. When I was 18, I left for the United States and studied photography, printmaking and some video at Bennington College in Vermont. I had crazy ideas of what I thought I would study but I picked up an SLR camera my first term there and that was the start of what still propels me today – a love for images and a process of unraveling experience through time measured as moments. 

In 2001 I returned to Pakistan and taught at Karachi University and Indus Valley part time. I was working freelance until 2003 when I was granted a merit scholarship to study in the department of film, video and new media at the School of Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).  After completing my MFA in 2006 and subsequently teaching at SAIC for a semester, I began working in Pakistan as an independent producer and part time faculty at Beaconhouse National university and the National college of Arts in Lahore­.  

I’ve also worked for the last two years as Creative Associate (Pakistan) with London based arts organization 'motiroti. 60 by 60 secs'. The first phase of their new crossover project (360 degrees) has been widely exhibited in 2008 at venues as diverse as Aicon Gallery (NY), The Royal Geographical Society (UK) and The Alhambra cultural Complex (Pakistan) amongst many others.  

A.  What would you say was the genesis of your interest and work?  

S. In many ways, it was the experience of being in The United States that dredged up all sorts of issues about my place in and relationship to home. At 18 began the bombardment of questions about my country and my identity as a representative of Pakistan - all things I was unfit to handle. 

While I was growing up in Pakistan, I wasn’t wondering about life – why things were the way they were, or how we got to live the way we did. I took my environment entirely for granted until my departure and since then, I have faced what many will reaffirm is the feeling of never being able to return to what one left. 

Since that was lost, I have done what any other might do – I have tried to make sense out of pieces. What is home, really? My interest began in looking at the nature of the systems that help us identify ourselves, the codes we live by. That led to a desire to peel back the layers on something that I thought knew so intimately, so well, I didn’t even think about it. My early work reflects these concerns and I began my looking into the relations between private and public space. 

For me private space belonged to women and men dominated the public sphere. I started making photographs and then videos of the space I belonged in as much as I started questioning the rules of engagement with the other side. My interest in boundaries and signs that demarcate the other has been a lasting one since then. 

Much to the dismay of my family and friends, they have been essential to my practice. I have used them in my work as reluctantly recruited representatives of sorts. Their images enact visions of walls as impenetrable dividers, of treasured private spaces, of the home as a battlefield of tradition and modernity, class difference and power structures. 

All this is to say that each character and the very home itself are a means to look at and speak about the ways through which love, belonging and difference are articulated in contemporary life.  

'Untitled' 

A. What would you say is the focus of your work? 

S. My work tends to be tremendously personal and often has the potential to complicate and compromise, to varying degrees, life beyond the work itself. The focus, and indeed significance of the works change according to shifting geographies and their relative boundaries, but it almost always has its narrative roots tied to ideas/ideologies we keep about class, gender and religious structures in Pakistan. 

I say the word we carefully because the issue of representation has tended to weigh heavily on my work, since the bulk of my time as a working artist has been spent in the United States. This fact has forced to me examine (repeatedly), who and what it is that my work speaks about and who it can speak to. When I do have to use that word to contextualize my work, I speak of a particular community of people, the small minority of educated Pakistanis that occupy the dubious position of being modernized. 

That would be a polite word for westernized. 

I found early on that it was easier and certainly more convenient to tell the story about the Other - to photograph knick knacks, old people and children in bazaars and stay on the safe side of cultural representation. This proved impossible for me to do and I found my voice in telling the stories I knew. I’m quite certain they have a place in recording part of the narrative that marks our identities.  

A. What is your recent work about? 

S. Till now, I have found that my work has been thematically fairly South Asian in that it has been about a connection to the norms of this particular region.  

Currently, I am working on a video installation piece (Conversations at the edge) that explores the class structure that prevails – looking at how it demarcates and sets us up. My interest lies in the markers of the other that appear deceptively benign or normal, something like one’s accent when speaking English signaling whether one is a paindu or a burger. 

In the work before (Between White Walls) images of interior home spaces and the lives lived out there came into play with sequential images of the city of Karachi – again the emphasis was on reflecting on the subtleties of relationships between private and public spaces.  

'Between White Walls' 

'Between White Walls' 

Other recent works have engaged the spiritual side of Islam and religious thought. I have been specifically interested in the ideas of religious inheritance and how belief transforms with time. 

'Looking Up'

A. Which medium are you most comfortable with? 

S. I take pictures all the time so if forced to choose one I would say photography.  I have a substantial archive because making images is the part of the process of making work closest, for me, to pure pleasure. It comes for me in the form of printmaking, video, film, photo and drawing. I am least comfortable with drawing but am eager to incorporate it into my work in the form of graffiti and other public art.  

A. What would you say has been the progression of the various themes and what do you hope to reflect in your work? 

S. Well you now know quite a bit about where the work comes from! I can imagine that it will progress in ways that continue to challenge both my private life and more general public notions regarding identity. 

I guess the goal of my work is to create a certain sense of awareness around the issues it speaks about.  When the work is about class structure I hope that people will see something in it that forces them to call into question their own position within the framework that has been set up. When the work speaks about a particular family, gender or age and the politics surrounding it, it does so to invite the viewer to find new, unconventional ways to engage with the people/situations presented.  

A.  So is your mirror a critical one? 

S.  Oh yes.  Absolutely. At least I like to imagine so. This does not mean however that there are not also levels of appreciation, sympathy and affinity reflected in the work.  

A.  Let’s talk specifically about some of your past work featured here 

S.  One past work, Three Generations and the Tourist I explored generational shifts regarding thought about public/private space, while looking playfully at the lives of three women of the same family. That piece tried to examine what one inherits, what one chooses to keep and what one discards as irrelevant. There are commonalities that you and I would have and ones that my grandmother would have with yours.  

The window display, split horizontally and vertically into three in layers, stood at the corner of a busy main street in chicago and that allowed me to show what are traditionally considered private images as public moments, while simultaneously obscuring the images most families are happy to share (wedding pictures and so forth).