Omer Wasim on Residency in Switzerland
Omer Wasim
Photo credit: Khadijah Mobin
To Root, to Exist: Proposal for a Cross Border Collection of Seeds by Omer Wasim. Installation view from Proposals for a Memorial to Partition, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (UAE), 2022. Photo credit: Daniel Baptista.
Omer Wasim is an intermedial artist from Pakistan. His practice queers space, subverting the frames of development and progress that shape human relationships to cities and nature. His work bears witness to the relentless erasure, violence, and destruction of our times by staying with more-than-human bodies. Read more on Omer here.
Wasim’s proposed project during his residency draws from the use of indigenous weeds, plants, and water in pre-modern healing and care traditions in Switzerland and South Asia. With climate change, development, and rapid urbanisation, such practices are being lost while also being appropriated by healing and care industries. Through this project, he wants to understand how these practices intersect within and across geographies to index their radical potential. Simultaneously reparative toward both human and more-than-human worlds, they make accessible modes of being that are in sync with our natural environment, returning us to our roots.
