Desperately Seeking Paradise, 2007-8, C-Print + DIASEC and Stainless Steel , 108 x 108 x 108 in.

From the time of conception of Desperately Seeking Paradise, I knew it
was going to be an ambitious and daring work, due to its sheer scale.
But what I didn’t know was that it would be the meeting point for all
the different threads in my art. Among those, ‘two-dimensionality’ as a
concern has always remained a core factor since the time of my ‘grid
paintings’ from early 1990s, though it’s ironical that the exploration of
two-dimensionality becomes effectual in this three-dimensional work
instead. This merger of two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality
is a point where I tread between representation and abstraction
too. Desperately Seeking Paradise in a way is a deceptively abstract
work, or at least it appears to be an abstract minimal structure from
one view but the view from the other side is inherently representational;
the horizontal stacking of images of homes (from Lahore) forms a
virtual skyline of an imaginary city with high-rise buildings representing
the evolution of the human society and breaking away from the
groundings we have concurrent to a house. The concept of home
itself has an aspect of duality, where there is an objective criteria
of a home pertaining to the environment and the subjective one, a
human’s vision of what he desires it to be like. The polarity of verticality
vs. horizontality creates illusions and realities within one work, these
illusions and realities I feel are what make each other exist, and like
the form of a grid – separate, and simultaneously make the multiple
entities into one whole. These parallels in life and concepts are exactly
what I try to elude and incorporate, and expound through my work,
where every idea and truth has an opposite self.