sumaiya saiyed
sumaiya saiyed
Sumaiya Saiyed (b. Karachi) is a multidisciplinary artist working across large-scale textile installation, metal fabrication, and kinetic sculpture. Her practice is informed by the historical and political experience of the female body in Pakistan and her lived experience with Prurigo Nodularis, a skin condition that became the catalyst for investigating how colonial beauty standards continue determining which bodies are valued and which remain invisible.
Saiyed holds an MFA from Parsons School of Design (2025, Presidential Scholarship) and a BFA from Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi (2019). Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic Magazine and exhibited at Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery (New York), Como Museum of Art (Lahore), and galleries across Pakistan and the United States. She is a 2024 nominee for The Dedalus Fellowship and the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship.
Her monumental installations juxtapose oxidized industrial metals with culturally significant textiles (velvet, Banarasi brocade, hand-dyed silks), creating visceral forms that oscillate between attraction and repulsion. Through laborious techniques such as pleating, gathering, sculpting, and stitching, she treats materials not as medium but as collaborators with their own agency, in dialogue with her skin's unpredictable cycles of itching, scratching, scarring, peeling, and healing.
Currently based in Karachi, Saiyed's research excavates colonial histories of bodily extraction that reveal how colonial and imperial cores continue to exert power over South Asian bodies. From punkah wallahs (manual fan pullers) whose bodies were systematically depleted to provide comfort to British colonizers, to the contemporary trade in South Asian women's hair circulating through Western and African markets, her work traces how extraction systems transformed rather than disappeared.
My practice began with a contradiction my body taught me: if I don't peel, it doesn't heal. Living with Prurigo Nodularis in Pakistan meant my skin became a site where beauty standards inherited from colonial violence were violently enforced. The volatility of my condition (a symptom without a cause, shifting from red to pink, purple, brown, black to green) left imprints not just on my flesh but on memory: as anxiety, shame, dishonor, reprimand, ugliness. Yet there was also unexpected beauty in these transformations, shapes and textures revealing another world under a microscope. My path as an artist started with being told to cover and conceal myself with textiles; now those same textiles undergo their own transformation, forming and deforming and reforming, creating works that both repel and attract.
This experience of being marked as damaged gave me a lens for recognizing other systems of bodily marking and extraction. When I encountered the punkah wallahs (manual fan pullers) in colonial archives, I understood viscerally what it meant for certain bodies to be rendered simultaneously essential and invisible. These servants, chosen specifically for their deafness, pulled fabric fans for hours in colonial India, unable to hear their oppressors' conversations while their bodies were systematically depleted to generate comfort. The colonial household manuals describe them with the same language used to describe my skin: aberrant, requiring control, valuable only when properly managed and concealed from polite view.
What struck me was how this logic of extraction didn't end with colonialism but transformed. Today, South Asian women's hair flows through global commodity chains in eerily similar patterns. In Pakistan, women from impoverished backgrounds sell their hair for minimal amounts, which then sells for significantly more in Western luxury markets. The same bodies colonial powers once exploited for labor are now exploited for biological materials. Women remain largely unaware of the profits generated from what they sold out of economic necessity, just as punkah wallahs were kept deaf to the conversations their labor enabled.
My installations make these connections physical and unavoidable. Working with materials that carry both violence and memory (oxidized metals salvaged from streets, Banarasi brocades woven with generations of labor, human hair extensions collected from salon waste), I create immersive environments where historical and contemporary extraction collapse into each other. When you stand beneath a sixteen-foot punkah fan fringed with human hair, when you watch it activated by rope pulleys that reference endless colonial labor, when the movement of one element forces other textile bodies to sway in response, you feel the choreography of control that persists from colonial India to contemporary global capitalism.
My methodology mirrors my subject. Materials function as collaborators with their own agency, in dialogue with my skin's unpredictable cycles. Through laborious techniques (pleating, gathering, sculpting, stitching), I build forms that must be deconstructed and reconstructed repeatedly. I use bleach to mark and erode fabric the way my condition marks and erodes my skin, creating testimonies of bodies caught in storms of societal expectations. The work thrives on juxtaposition: industrial metals with culturally significant textiles, decay with opulence, gorgeous with grotesque. These installations reference Karachi's streets after Eid sacrifices, where violence and viscera, sacred and profane, intermingle with daily commerce, where what is inside the body becomes suddenly, uncomfortably visible.
This is what I offer: a different kind of scrutiny and a different type of beauty than what is typically permitted to marked bodies. My work provokes unease, visceral responses oscillating between attraction and repulsion, because it insists you reckon with how imperial structures of extraction haven't disappeared but evolved. It questions how we are figured or disfigured by cultural narratives that determine which bodies matter and which remain invisible, extracted from, used up. It argues for beauty that is violent and visceral, beauty that emerges through decay and transformation rather than despite it, beauty that refuses to comfort because comfort has always required someone else's suffering.