Mohsin Shafi

Mohsin Shafi is a visual essayist based in Lahore/Pakistan whose interdisciplinary practice examines the politics of embodiment: how people are watched, diagnosed, dressed, desired, made suspect, and rendered unsafe. Working across moving image, installation, performance, sound, text, drawing, and mixed-media collage, he draws on vernacular culture, oral traditions, parental knowledge, and regional thought rather than granting contemporary Western theory sole interpretive authority. Growing up between Punjabi and Urdu before encountering English shaped his understanding of verbal, visual, and material expression as performed, hesitant, and continuously translated. Across these overlapping forms, the body becomes an archive of memory and injury, a surface of social regulation, and a means of reconfiguring care, imagination, vulnerability, desire, and belonging.

Employing self-mimicry, Shafi exposes autobiographical realities while resisting their confinement 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; politically sensitive pieces have at times encountered both state and self-imposed censorship. Earlier, Sadaism — derived from Sada, meaning »our own« in Punjabi — recast Dadaist strategies in Pakistan using parody.

At Akademie Schloss Solitude, Shafi is developing Made in Pakistan, which probes the desiring body, commodity circulation, and clothing. Using screen-based work, sound, and writing, it follows leather made in Pakistan into Berlin’s fetish shops, asking how an object produced in one cultural economy acquires different permissions of wear, pleasure, and visibility in another. By placing himself inside this clothing, Shafi considers who may wear what, whose desires become socially legible, and how the identity of the wearer alters the meaning of the same material. He asks what it means for material to cross borders more freely than the body that recognizes itself in it. Holding leather simultaneously as commodity and costume, second skin and evidence, the project examines labour, the racialized gaze, fantasies of masculinity, and the unstable question of fit. It also unsettles the geography of safety: so-called safe spaces do not afford equal protection to everyone, while refuge may emerge where danger is presumed.

In parallel, Shafi is developing German Dawakhana, a visual inquiry connecting Pakistan and Germany. It arises from his observations since adolescence of how advertisements for men’s sexual health have migrated from wall-chalking and hand-painted signs to printed posters and digital imagery. Beginning as a series of drawings, it is conceived to expand into a mockumentary and public-space interventions in Lahore and Germany using posters, installations, and performance. It considers how borrowed German scientific prestige enters Pakistan’s urban landscape, turning masculinity into a promise of strength and a measure of inadequacy.

Shafi also continues Malamatiya, a long-standing, deeply personal project joining precolonial understandings of love and intimacy with Sufi thought, mourning, parental memory, nonconformity, and surrender without erasure. A parallel exploration of ghar ghar (home home) turns inherited and domestic cloth into tapestries that hold the absent body through grief, family memory, and remembrance. Spanning Pakistan and Europe, Love, As I Inherited It assembles moving image, correspondence, song, and personal objects to test South Asian romantic inheritances against the distance between reel and real. For its concluding phase, he is composing a text that reframes »happily ever after« as a future no longer dependent upon the beloved once imagined within it. Simultaneously, 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.