In The Name of Hypersurface of the Present

Concept Text:

My proposal is an animation and speculative fiction on the feminist historicization of Pakistan as the first »Muslim nuclear state« through state and familial archives. The script is written through the canon of patriarchal state structure via a fictional, populist, contemporary Urdu poet; subversively implicating the bodies of citizens, specifically women, as the containers to perpetuate state sanctioned notions of love, science, and nature. The narrative inverts this »In the Name of God« rhetoric initially used to push the Pakistani nuclear project. The research materials are an extension of an animation series, »The Atomically Explosive Love.«

This narrative proposes a phallic green cone as a stand-in figure to replace Chaghi Monument Hill, a recently destroyed state monument. The video functions as an instruction manual both conceptually and structurally for citizens displaced from the Chaghi Monument Hill, a site used for male-dominated celebrations of Youm e Takbeer, a national holiday that commemorated the nuclear tests done in the 1990s. The fiction and choreography expels how the phallic green cone/green light is inherent and can be activated through the cones in the eye and ear, reproductive cones (within plant life), cones in digital space (modes of projection), and within theoretical physics to reconfigure the measurement of time-space. Green light functions as a mode of spirituality perpetuated and disseminated by Pakistani nationalism, Islamic Orientalism, populist green screen interfaces, and light therapy.