Mohsin Shafi

Mohsin Shafi is a visual essayist based in Lahore/Pakistan whose interdisciplinary practice emerges from the restless pulse of South Asia – its silences, contradictions, and intimate histories – unfolding through moving image, installation, performance, sound, text, drawing, and mixed-media collage. He draws upon vernacular culture, oral traditions, knowledge absorbed from his parents, and literary and musical inheritances carried by folk legends and cultural ancestors. Without granting contemporary Western theory sole interpretive authority, Shafi turns to regional philosophies to reconsider care, imagination, and coexistence amid the lingering effects of colonial rule.

Growing up between Punjabi and Urdu before encountering English much later shaped his understanding of expression – verbal, visual, and material – as something performed, hesitant, interpreted, translated, and continuously negotiated. This sensibility informs his studio methodology. Instead of separating different mediums, he allows them to overlap, interrupt, and complete one another, trusting each to convey meanings the others cannot fully contain.

Shafi’s autobiographical method employs self-mimicry to expose lived realities through vulnerability without confining them to confession. His compositions hold trauma alongside repair, depression beside absurdity, grief against longing, and tragedy with tenderness. Satire, subtle humor, and black comedy resist singular readings. Often emotionally charged and politically sensitive, his work has at times encountered both state and self-imposed censorship. An earlier undertaking, SADAISM – derived from sada, meaning »our own« in Punjabi – recast Dadaist strategies within Pakistan, using parody to confront structures of power.

At Akademie Schloss Solitude, Shafi is developing German Dawakhana, a visual inquiry situated between Lahore and Stuttgart/Germany. Rooted in hand-painted signs, wall texts, and cheaply printed clinic posters woven into Pakistan’s everyday urban landscape, it relocates this street vocabulary within a speculative archive. The project considers how the borrowed authority of Germany lends credibility to promises of male strength, while idealized bodies turn masculinity into a standard against which viewers measure themselves – producing desire, shame, and self-doubt. The subject carries an intimate genealogy: his great-grandmother was a healer in India, his grandfather practiced hikmat, and his father combined pharmacy with knowledge passed through that lineage.

During his fellowship, Shafi is also bringing Bollywood Destroyed My Expectations of Love to completion. Conceived as a screen-based work, it mimics and unsettles Bollywood conventions by measuring South Asian cinematic fantasies against an autobiographical archive formed across Pakistan and Europe. Personal correspondence, staged self-portrayals, dialogue, songs, and journeys converge within fragile footage that traces the distance between reel and real. Having arrived at a self-authored form of closure, the work reframes »happily ever after« as a future no longer dependent upon the person once imagined within it.

In parallel, Shafi is developing Malamtiya, a deeply personal inquiry that brings precolonial understandings of love and intimacy into conversation with Sufi thought, mourning, parental memory, nonconformity, and surrender without erasure. He is writing his first book, Almost: A Memoir in Progress, where essay, life-writing, and literary reflection converge.

Recent presentations include Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2025–2026); Queer Museum Vienna, Austria (2024); and Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn/Germany (2026). Residencies include AIR Niederösterreich, Krems (2024); 1646 Experimental Art Space, The Hague/Netherlands (2021); and Atelier Mondial, Basel/Switzerland (2019). His recent projects in Pakistan include the solo exhibition The Anatomy of Becoming at one of the country’s leading contemporary art venues, Canvas Gallery in Karachi/Pakistan, and Museum of Repairing Reminiscences, a year-long participatory museum experiment he envisioned and developed with Vasl Artists’ Association, Karachi and The Repair Atelier, Providence/USA. He holds degrees in design and fine arts from the National College of Arts in Lahore, one of South Asia’s oldest art institutions.