Join us for a virtual panel discussion presented in conjunction with the exhibition Umber Majeed: J😊Y TECH. Responding to Majeed’s counter-narrative of the Pakistan Pavilion at the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair and her ongoing Trans-Pakistan project, this panel brings together artists, curators and writers who pose critical questions about nation building, technology, authenticity, and copy culture. The conversation will reflect on the power of revisiting histories as an act of reenactment, repair, or speculation. How can we tend to gaps in the archive and transform personal or collective memories into something much more malleable and interactive? These methods will come into focus through Majeed’s work and each of the speakers’ own perspectives and research, drawing connections through humor, failure, and grief, as well as cultural memories of the South Asian diaspora, software iteration, and artist responses to World’s Fairs throughout the 20th century.

Please RSVP here.

Speaker Bios:

Nora N. Khan is an independent critic, essayist, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles. Her writing on philosophy of AI and emerging technologies is referenced heavily across fields. Formally, this work attempts to theorize the limits of algorithmic knowledge and locate computation’s influence on critical language. She currently teaches in Sci-Arc’s History and Theory program, following roles as Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts (2024-2025) and Professor in Digital+Media at RISD (2018-2021). Her books are AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (2025), Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019) and Fear Indexing the X-Files (2017), with Steven Warwick. She is a member of the Curatorial Ensemble of the 2026 edition of Counterpublic, one of the nation’s largest public civic exhibitions, focused next on ‘Near Futures’. She was the Co-Curator with Andrea Bellini of the Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement 2024, A Cosmic Movie Camera, hosted by Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and also curated Manual Override at The Shed (2020).

Sa’dia Rehman (all pronouns) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator focusing on race, empire, and labor. Their work explores structures of the family, the nation, the border. Rehman questions how we live within these systems and how they impact who we are, the desire to rearrange, and take them apart. Rehman has exhibited work at the Tate Modern (London, UK), Wexner Center for the Arts, Queens Museum, Frost Art Museum, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and Pakistan National Council of the Arts. Rehman received the Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Fellowship and the Meredith Morabito and Henrietta Mantooth Fellowship. Rehman was awarded residencies at the ArtLab at Harvard University, Film/Video Studio at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Omi, Abrons Art Center, KODA, Asian American Arts Alliance, Edward Albee Foundation. Their work was featured in Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail,  The New York Times, Harpers, The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Colonize This! Young Women of Color On Today’s Feminism, and Breakthru Radio.

Murtaza Vali is a critic, curator, and art historian based in Brooklyn and Sharjah. A recipient of a 2011 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing, he publishes regularly in art periodicals and exhibition catalogues for non-profit institutions and commercial galleries. Vali is an Adjunct Curator at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, where he organized the widely-acclaimed group exhibitions Crude (2018-19), which explored the relationship between oil and modernity across West Asia and North Africa, and Guest Relations (with Lucas Morin) (2023-24), a sequel exhibition examining hotels and the hospitality industry across the Global South. He is also the curator of Proposals for a Memorial to Partition, an itinerant research and curatorial platform investigating the lingering trauma and legacy of partitions in South Asia and beyond. First appearing in Manual for Treason, a publication commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011), subsequent iterations of this project have been presented at the Jameel Arts Centre (2022-23) and Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia (2023).

Umber Majeed is a multidisciplinary visual artist and educator. Her writing, performance, and animation work engage with familial archives to explore Pakistani state, urban, and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in New York, NY and BFA from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan. Majeed has presented her work in solo exhibitions at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2022); 1708 Gallery, Richmond, Virgina (2021); and the Rubber Factory, New York (2018). She has shown internationally in group exhibitions at Hayy Jameel, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (2024); the Asian Art Biennial at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan (2021); Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, UAE (2019); the Karachi Biennale, Karachi, Pakistan (2017), among others. Majeed is a recipient of the HWP Fellowship from Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon (2017); the Refiguring Feminist Futures Web Residency from Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM, Germany (2018); the Digital Earth Fellowship from Hivos, the Netherlands (2018-2019); and the Technology Residency from Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2020).