Huma
Mulji

Huma Mulji characterizes herself as a flâneuse, a keen observer of the minutiae of daily city life. Displaying an acute sensitivity to their sensorial and material specificities, much of her work emerges from and reflects on the urban everyday in the places she has called home: Karachi, where she was born and raised, and Lahore, where she lived and taught for two decades. Working across media, the object, both found and fabricated, lies at the heart of her practice. In an important early work, Mulji photographed a pair of dolls in flagrante delicto in public spaces across Lahore, using them as proxies through which to question social codes of modesty and propriety. A rare excursion into “painting” in 2012 resulted in trompe l’oeil recreations of Pakistani middle class interiors, with rusted pipes, water stained walls, exposed wiring, and antiquated switches and fixtures, all presided over by a requisite gecko. Bursting with taxidermied birds and animals, and with dolls, toys, antiquated surgical instruments, religious talismans and other knick knacks collected during sojourns through Lahore, The Miraculous Lives of This and That (2013) is a contemporary cabinet of curiosities that intentionally troubles commonly held categorical distinctions between body and fragment, animate and inanimate, abjection and desire, sacred and profane.

Your Tongue in my Mouth (2022) — Mulji’s first solo exhibition in the UK, where she has lived since 2015—traced the afterlife of a largely forgotten colonial monument: Karachi’s Queen Victoria Memorial. Disassembled and relocated in 1962, Mulji recreated the footprint of its original plinth, now lost, as a void cut out of an ornate tiled floor. Nearby, a roughly life-size photograph of the marble statue of the Queen showed its current condition, neglected and caked in dust at the Mohatta Palace, the face obscured by a resplendent bloom of bougainvillea, as native flora reclaimed its dominion. In a double channel video, Mulji documented how the bronze lions that once proudly flanked the Queen now serve as props for snapshots by families visiting the Karachi Zoo, where they now sit. The remnants of this once grand projection of colonial hubris have been thoroughly domesticated, ingested by and folded into the city’s irrepressible daily churn.

Mulji’s most recent exhibition, Aftermath (2024), represents a significant departure. Marked by a growing interest in process and a shift towards abstraction, it reflects on her experience as an immigrant. It consists of sculptures produced through a staged material encounter between blown glass and found wood. While the malleable molten glass adapts its shape to the rigid wood, its intense heat marks the point of contact with a halo of soot. Holding the artist’s breath, these distorted biomorphic vessels are also proxies, for displaced people such as herself, forced to adapt their bodies and selves in unfamiliar and sometimes inhospitable new contexts while invariably leaving their mark on the peoples, societies, and landscapes they come to inhabit.

Text: Murtaza Vali