Ayesha M Ali

Creative Director/Visual Artist • Oshii brownie

Currently she is working as a Wardrobe stylist for a feature film and is also working on a capsule collection for an editorial shoot. She is also working as a Co-founder and costume designer for her initiative “Cosmic Tribe” to raise awareness about Light Pollution. Her practice aims to deconstruct, reimagine and reinvent how a gender gradient can be viewed, understood and visualised, which she does by integrating elements of exaggeration, drama and costumes to create an alternate truth.

Pakistan

My practice engages with the blurred boundaries that arise between the concepts of reality, illusions, collective memory, scrutiny, and gender roles exhibited and masqueraded in pop culture. The idea of ‘projected truth’ can be understood through the language of costumes and jewelry as a medium to respond to the observed/transforming culture that we are a part of. The visuals and facial jewelry designs stem from my interpretation of how facial recognition algorithms embedded in social media applications identify, intrude, and scrutinize people’s everyday lives. Fantastical, imagined, and hyper-real characters in my work represent the distorted truth while simultaneously attempting a mutiny in the face of the Snapchat camera lens. The question ‘What is self?’ remains lost somewhere in the reflection of the ‘other’. It becomes crucial to dissect this web of complex visibility patterns concerning the ideas of simulation, where this curated ‘self’ becomes another way to vicariously live out an alternate narrative, however groundless in reality. These simulated avatars, dressed like dark warriors, are seeking to recoup what is lost – the greater consciousness, that cosmic connection diluted in the light pollution. We need to seek the origin to retain ourselves as an ‘original’ in this fast-paced global image rotation, the land of a copy of the ‘copy’ that sets bizarre standards for aesthetics. My work becomes an embodiment of unnatural ways of living, in an alter space/place of mind, and in-between semi-conscious future state of fashion. Through this project, I have to reinterpret and imagine a futuristic sense of fashion trends through the lens of sustainability and surveillance. I therefore work across mixing mediums, costume construction and softwares to produce images that reinterpret culture in the local context.