Khak-e Hayat Residency in Lahore: Exploring Shared Ecological Destinies between Iran and Pakistan

Since 2020, Ajam has organized residency workshops in Lahore bringing together artists and academics from Iran and Pakistan to explore the shared threads binding together our regions and to forge renewed cultural and intellectual ties in the present. We were proud to partner in Fall 2025 with the Pakistan National College of Arts (NCA) to present Khak-e Hayat: Shared Ecological Destinies between Iran and Pakistan.

Khak-e Hayat was a two-week research residency organized by Ajam Media Collective bringing together 14 artists, academics, and architects from Iran and Pakistan to explore the region’s shared ecological pasts and imagine alternative visions for a collective future.

The residency took place from October 27-November 8, 2025 as part of the NCA Triennale, with panels, workshops, and listening sessions held daily. Simultaneously, residency participants engage in ethnographic research across and around Lahore focused on sites related to workshop themes, including architectural heritage, artisan knowledge, environmental legacies and multicultural histories, public space, and artistic practice.

Over the course of the residency, events were attended by more than 200 participants from the NCA community and Lahore more widely. Participants are now working collectively on a book about their experience and planning for a follow-up residency in Karachi in 2026.

The residency brought artists, academics, and architects to exchange knowledge, engage the public, and share lessons from both sides of the border.  The residency included studies of textiles, sonic cultures, and regional histories through archaeological, architectural, and anthropological perspectives. We engaged in ethnographic site visits to listen to Heer Waris Shah’s poetry at Peer Waris Shah, to hear histories of water and soil at Hiran Minar, and to explore alternative Lahori narratives at Gurdwara Janamasthan Bebe Nanaki. In Lahore, we spent time at Miani Sahib Cemetery and meeting River Ravi.

For millenia, people in our region have adapted to changing conditions. We have much to teach each other, but we can only do that by stitching connections across borders. This residency took inspiration from this history to explore the present and reimagine the future.

The residency was curated by Alex Shams, editor-in-chief of Ajam Media Collective, a platform that organizes artistic and academic collaborations between West, Central, and South Asia. Ajam works with artists, archivists, writers, and academics to weave together threads of culture and history through articles, podcasts, residencies and workshops. Shams previously curated “Naskh va Taaliq: Connections Between Iran and Pakistan, Old and New,” as part of the 2020 Lahore Biennale.

Please find below images from the residency, an extended description of the concept, and participant biographies. 

Today, more than ever, our region faces an ecological crisis. On both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border, a lack of water, extreme heat, and bureaucratic hostility make life increasingly unlivable. Instead, we are confronted by a militarized frontier and a rupture of dialogue that prevents us from learning from each other. In this two-week workshop, we aim to build a language through art with which to imagine a shared future across Iran and Pakistan, two lands deeply connected by geography, culture, history, and nature, but divided today by politics and war. We will develop this dialogue by creating a space to learn from our past and sharing our work, our struggles, and our dreams in the present.

The workshop is entitled Khak-e Hayat, an expression meaning the “Dirt of Life” equally legible in Persian and Urdu. This name takes inspiration from the shared mud- brick vernacular architecture that historically binds the urban environments of Iran and Pakistan. For millenia, wind towers built from clay have miraculously channeled desert winds into homes, making life possible across our region. We see these buildings not only as structures but also works of art, crafted delicately by countless hands and minds, repositories of ancient knowledge, methods, and techniques for how to survive in an unpredictable world. We see them as gifts from the past, lessons in how to situate, survive, and thrive in our present and future.

But for cities to be alive, culture must be alive as well. We must not only learn how to build, but how to live – and how to exist collectively. We must dismantle the systems that have prevented us from hearing and seeing each other; the border walls that make us imagine our destinies are separate rather than shared. We aim not to become lost in nostalgia, but to build a shared recognition of the knowledges that have been lost and pathways to build, rebuild and connect in the present.

Khak-e Hayat is a two-week research residency combining intellectual conversations and public-facing panel conversations. The intellectual conversations take place daily during this period and are be directed through lectures, presentations, and discussions facilitated by each participant, exploring an aspect of their past work relevant to the workshop theme.

Simultaneously, participants engage in ethnographic research through visits across Lahore focused on previously-selected sites related to workshop themes, including architectural renovation, artisan knowledge, public space, and artist practice. The sites are curated to focus on spaces and practices that link Iran and Pakistan through threads of Persianate cultural practices and historical memory, facilitating recognition of the shared imaginaries that bind these two geographies.

The two-week workshop collaboration with participants from across Iran and Pakistan creates threads for collaboration and discussion in the panel and will gesture toward the art book that participants will collectively create following its conclusion. Khak-e Hayat showcases artistic production that explores shared cultural histories with a focus on geography and ecology, including storytelling. 

Full Participant Bios

Abdul Rehman is a slow fashion designer, researcher and visual ethnographer who works at the intersection of indigenous cultures, shared South Asian nostalgia, literature, art and fashion. He is the founder of a slow fashion label Aangan which promotes locally inspired sustainable fashion. He is the author of a landmark nationwide report on sustainable fashion in Pakistan which was the outcome of a yearlong ethnographic research across rural and urban areas of Punjab and Sindh. His recent initiative is Trinjan, an open for all collective, with an aim to promote research, education and awareness on sustainable fashion through local communal practices. He also documents aural and visual culture of medieval Punjabi literature.

Abuzar Madhu is a Lahore-based performing artist, climate justice activist, and researcher whose work moves at the confluence of body, ecology, and collective memory. Rooted in decolonial methodologies, their practice extends and amplifies indigenous knowledge systems, oral traditions, and embodied forms of learning. As a founding member of the Ravi Bachao Tehreek (Save Ravi Movement), Madhu’s activism centers on river and ecological justice. In Lahore Biennale Chapter 03, they presented Humming with Ravi, mapping colonial infrastructures, polluted drains, and communal rituals of resistance. As part of the Biennale, Madhu also performed several public performances. Their engagement with moving-image storytelling includes ecological films such as The Mother, the Sons, and The Holy River (2025), Republic of Veiling Trees (2023), and Milaap (2023). Through performance, walking, cinema, and community-based interventions, Madhu creates spaces where art becomes a form of protest, mourning, and collective healing.

Ahmadali Kadivar is an interdisciplinary artist, journalist, and archivist of folk music based in Tehran. His practice moves between music, literature, geography, and anthropology. He is the founder and curator of Sedakhane Iranian Folk Music Library, one of the most comprehensive archives of Iranian folk music to date. Kadivar holds a BA in Comparative Religions and Sufism, and his works have been presented at Busan Biennale, Lahore Biennale, Amsterdam Art Week, and Roberoo Mansion in Tehran. His writings have appeared in several Tehran-based journals, and he is the co-author of Whale’s Tear and Songs of Continuous Cities. 

Ahmed Hasan is a photographer, writer, and field recordist from Sahiwal, living between Punjab, Sindh and the Hunza Valley. He is co-founder of Khanabadosh Baithak in Gojal, a campsite, café, and gathering space for artists, musicians, and dreamers. His work centers on wandering and listening, also shaping his series of essays, Darya Panth, which follows the Sindhu (River Indus) through stories of memory, myth, and survival. His travels through shrines and temples led him to Bhit Shah, where the raag inspired the Khanabadosh Sound Archive and later Amrit Pyala, a project preserving folk voices and devotional music that continue to guide his practice. 

Alex Shams is a writer and anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago. His dissertation research focused on culture, religion, and politics in contemporary West Asia and he was based in Tehran for several years. His work highlights overlooked transnational histories to imagine alternative futures and connections. He is editor of Ajam Media Collective, an online platform focused on culture, society, and politics in West, Central, and South Asia. He previously worked as a journalist in Bethlehem, Palestine; his writing focused on grassroots resistance through Palestinian cultural memory. He received his MA from Harvard University and his BA from the University of Southern California. He is currently a post-graduate researcher at Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City.

Baneen Mirza is a photographer and co-founder of Khanabadosh Baithak, a communal space in Gilgit-Baltistan and a lived inquiry into the relationship between travel, sustainability, and indigenous wisdoms. With a focus on food, ecological practices, and the kitchen as a site of knowledge, she extends this inquiry through visual and edible mediums to explore what it means to live and learn in relation to land and its people.

Fazal Rizvi is an interdisciplinary artist from Pakistan. His inquiry rests somewhere between the personal, the social and the political. Having spent a few years thinking about the materiality and immateriality of the sea and its borders, Rizvi also keeps returning to the personal and familial as a place of trigger, and has been contemplating on ideas of mourning, remembering, memorialising and monument making. Rizvi graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2010. His work has been shown in various exhibitions including, Sharjah Biennale (2025), Lahore Biennale (2024 & 2018), Jogja Biennale (2023), Photo Kathmandu (2023), Colomboscope (2019) and more. He has been an artist in residence at the Arcus Studios, Japan in 2011, and was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust award for Gasworks Studios Residency, London in 2014, Pro Helvetia New Delhi Studio residency in Zurich, 2020. He was a resident artist at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Netherlands for the year 2020-21, and at Cite des Arts Paris, with Institute Francaise in 2023. Rizvi has also been a member of The Tentative Collective.

Golrokh Nafisi is an illustrator, puppet-maker, and visual artist whose practice is shaped by political and social events. Audience participation and travel—as ways of creating new maps and calendars—are central to her work. Born in Isfahan, she studied Industrial Design in Tehran and Fine Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands. Her series “Continuous Cities” uses fabrics gathered in cities such as Beirut, Cairo, and Lahore, installed with maps of her journeys in each host exhibition. Her works have been shown at the Rotterdam Biennale, the Busan Biennale, the Museum of Art in Finland, the Lahore Biennale, and galleries such as Aaran and Dastan in Tehran. She is also the author of Whale’s Tear, Sorrow, The Girl Without Hair, and The Testimony.

Marvi Mazhar is an architect and researcher whose practice combines visual culture, spatial advocacy, and urban interventions. She serves on several advisory boards in government and non-profit organizations. She regularly writes about issues related to real estate and heritage preservation for the newspaper Dawn, and recently co-edited the book Architecture for the Future (2023, MIT Publication) with Elke Krasny and Angelika Fritz. Mazhar is currently working in Kyrgyzstan and Georgia as lead architect for developing infrastructural and management connectivity. She has a Master’s from Goldsmiths, University of London, and her ongoing research focuses on the representation and production of Karachi’s urban and rural coastal periphery and its ecology.

Parisa Bahrami is an architect and interdisciplinary researcher whose work moves between architecture, sociology, and anthropology. Her career has involved work in urban and rural settings across Iran, with extensive field experience in crisis-affected settlements. Her early work focused on post-earthquake recovery, including reusing material from destroyed homes to build short-term shelter, and infrastructure improvement in marginalized urban areas with UN Habitat. She later joined Muassasseh Khak (The Institute of Earthen Architecture), a local NGO that revived and reconstructed the abandoned mud-brick citadel of Esfahak in South Khorasan, a project awarded a UNESCO research chair for its innovation and attention to traditional architecture. In the desert environments of Kashan and Ardakan, her work focused on sensitive preservation of historic earthen urban fabric and reconstruction and reinforcement of abandoned structures in parallel with implementing participatory decision-making with local communities. In recent years, she has worked in nomadic and peri-rural communities in Baluchistan province, where she has developed sustainable mud-brick techniques to build schools that can endure high temperatures, a project that was approved as a prototype for nomadic communities across the country. Her practice is guided by a commitment to social justice, sustainability, and the search for forms of design that remain grounded in place, culture, and community. 

Sina Fakour is a visual artist, graphic and type designer, researcher, and educator. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB). His work explores the concepts of language, writing systems, code, and translation, expressed through a wide range of mediums, including print, multilingual typography, editorial design, type design, creative coding, scientific experimentation, tool-making, photography, video, and more. Central to his practice is engagement with both ancient and contemporary writing systems, focusing on their historical and social dimensions. He regularly lectures on typography, his research, and his artistic practice at various events, and collaborates with art schools as a lecturer, jury member, or workshop instructor. 

Veera Rustomji is a multidisciplinary artist from Karachi. Her practice deals with historiographical power structures using materials built with research on geographical influences, religious iconography and archival methods.  She holds a BFA from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS) and an MA from Chelsea College of Arts at the University of the Arts London (UAL), where she was awarded the UAL Postgraduate International Scholarship. Veera is the recipient of the 2021–2022 Mead Fellowship, for which she produced a body of documentation capturing the erasure of island life and coastal heritage within the Indus Delta. Her site-specific investigations coexist alongside literary and community-based archives from public and private collections which examine the Zoroastrian diaspora. Veera is also the co-director of the Urban Repository Archive (URA) housed within the Department of Fine Art at IVS, which explores how student-lead research responds to the changing landscape of Karachi.