A Body Bleeds More Than It Contains

Single Channel Video | 5.1 Surround Sound | 27:14 min | 2026
Commissioned and produced by @colomboscope , with additional support from the @mondriaanfonds

This work writes itself through the remains of a long-disappearing cinematic culture, reaching its culmination in the recent demolition of one of Lahore’s oldest film studios—Bari Studio. A part of cultural history has now been entirely erased, one as old as the country itself.

Filmed with individuals associated with Lollywood, the work unfolds as a gradual progression, a slow yet persistent choreography of offered gestures shaped by memory, imagination, disagreement, reenactment, and the lived routines of a community I’ve worked with for over a decade. Together, we intend to trigger a reverberation, an energy that seeps through doors now closed to filmmaking, reaching into the space where the work is shown.

Since I began working with Lollywood, my practice is inherently generative. Each time we are faced with disappearance, it insists on creating—where even the unintentional acts of listening become ways to affirm existence.

I’ve come to understand this work as a rupture: one that took away part of my practice, fractured a sense of cinema-making, and unsettled personal memories tied to growing up in the same neighborhood where these studios once stood.

It leaves me with a few unresolved questions:
Can a film be made without a space?
Can the space of film itself—its duration and narrative—replace the physical ground that has now been lost forever?

Included here:

~ An installation view from Colomboscope 2026 curated by @hajrakarrar , with the artistic director @natasha_ginwala
~ A production drawing (early storyboard or idealization)
~ Research
~ A short excerpt from the video
@basir_mahmood