I See my Streets: Karachi’ is a new media installation project, driven by youth and community participation.

With the population of over 24 million people, Karachi is the world’s fastest-growing megacity with a remarkable 80% expansion over the past decade. Its streets are a chaos of movement, people, traffic, graffiti, landmarks, and a dense network of colonial, modern and makeshift architecture and spaces. For the Karachi Biennial I was interested to create new, visually rich, image centric, street views by investigating the hidden patterns and movements on these streets without the use of maps and numbers, instead using the contemporary social networks.

Today we live in an environment where our cities talk in data. We are recording and editing our present and documenting history in real-time. People post instant messages and images which include their locations on Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks. I am fascinated by this shift in how we interact and understand our environment and am interested to use these new information sources to represent the 21st century city. The project ‘I See my Streets: Karachi’ is a new visual metaphor for thinking about the city, through the eyes of its young inhabitants.  The project and the workshops leading to the installation challenges us to examine our relationship with our streets and neighborhoods and question how we are gradually moving away from seeing what is in close sight but instead look far and beyond thus moving towards cultural homogenization.

The participating youth in the project were select students and members from; The NJV High School, the Orangi Pilot Project, Karachi School of Art, and the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture.

 For more information about the project plz visit project website iseemystreets.com