Naz̤ar navigates the shifting terrain of visibility within migrant lives, with a focus on South Asian Muslim communities across European cities. Through stories, rituals, and everyday gestures—where visibility can be both refuge and risk— it listens to echoes of displacement and longing, tracing the ways in which memory, faith, and intimacy are held. The project renders its audio-visual fieldwork into interdisciplinary art practices that, in turn, assert the need to reclaim urban spaces against ghettoisation and the enforced invisibility of migrant lives. It engages with the overlooked geographies of migration and asks how these experiences might offer new ways of seeing, knowing, and reimagining the city.
The word Naz̤ar resonates with meanings such as ‘behold,’ ‘gaze,’ ‘surveillance,’ and extends to ‘evil eye’ in several South Asian languages. It carries a weight – sometimes protective, sometimes perilous. Naz̤ar can bless or wound, veil or expose, carry desire or suspicion – it is the unseen residue of looking.
The project is supported by:
The Onassis AiR Extended Research Residencies program in Athens, Greece.
Dreaming Suburbs Residency program at The Museum of Impossible Forms in Helsinki, Finland.