1. Heritage Legacy Authentic
Site-specific installation; 840 sheets of carbon paper on copier paper, 1000x1250cm, 2025 “Heritage Legacy Authentic” is a site-specific interactive installation that seeks to question ongoing efforts to conceal the disorderliness of urban spaces and neighborhoods in the region, while critiquing how authenticity, heritage and history can be constructed at the cost of erasing what has already existed. Using 800+ sheets of carbon paper over printed copier paper tiled to the ground, viewers are forced to interact with the work to enter the space, thus questioning their role in these new constructions.
I was walking home one night and noticed a stretch of canvas hoarding advertisements around a construction site, with the words “Heritage”, “Legacy”, and “Authentic”. Upon closer inspection, I found even more words, with markings of dirt, debris, and graffiti over them. This made me start questioning the vocabulary that is often used in justifying these real estate and development projects, whether to the betterment or detriment of the area.
The carbon paper acts as a durational recording device, imprinting every footstep involuntarily made in the space over the aforementioned vocabulary. Stretching from dense coverage on one side of the room to smaller dispersed clusters, it confronts the viewers by turning them from passive spectator to active participant, as they are forced to step on – and invited to kick, thrash, skid, and stomp over – the work, in order to enter and walk around the space, thus revealing the vocabulary underneath.
This project was commissioned by Ishara Art Foundation for the Summer 2025 exhibition titled “No Trespassing”, curated by Priyanka Mehra. Supported by the 2025 Artist Residency Program at 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi.
Elements of this work were inspired by collaborations between myself and Maitha Ali in 2024, as well as Manal Nadeem in 2025.