Unfinished Kite (working title, 2025) is an ongoing project from Karachi and Hunza Valley, Pakistan.

In 2015, I went to Karachi, Pakistan to meet my internet friends in real life, with the intention of photographing the bizarre transition of going from online to real life friends. Exactly a decade later, in February of 2025, I finally returned to continue the project.

I came into my 20s during the Tumblr blog era, having grown up discovering Aphex Twin and My Bloody Valentine via semi-sketchy .zip files on LimeWire. It was instantaneously easy to make friends online back then – it felt like a modernized version of the 2000s forum days, a place built for our special interests that we had no one else to talk to about. It started as a shared affection for leftfield music, micro labels, cassette tapes and DIY house shows. The music would range from ambient field recordings to footwork, techno, and bedroom pop – but almost always a version of the latter – recorded or produced on the cheap, and very often in a bedroom. I would write about my findings on a music blog I helped run with my (internet) friend Henning in Berlin, called No Fear of Pop.

In 2013, I came across a record by a Karachi-based ambient musician on Bandcamp, and immediately loved it. I reached out to him, curious if he could recommend other similar music in Pakistan, and in return came a list of 10-15 different bands and artists mostly based in Karachi, ranging from shoegaze to electronic music. 

Having already flown to the US several times to meet my music blog friends since 2012, it made sense for my 23-year old brain to expand east. In April, 2015, I spent a month in Karachi getting to know my online friends in person, and found solace in a community of artists who had created a space for art and queerness from scratch, in a city that had never really fostered it. I already knew so much about these people and their lives before my arrival, but had no sense of their outward selves. But the reality of poverty and corruption was still very much a backdrop to the life there – we hid our phones in the trunk of the car when going from one house to the other, and kept cash handy in case we got stopped and harassed by the military.

During my trip in 2015, I was introduced to Sabeen Mahmud. She had been described to me as a sort of feminist mother of the Karachi DIY scene, and had helped open T2F, a small two-story community space intended for band rehearsals, poetry nights, political discussions, and most importantly, a place to make friends in. She rode a scooter to work, had short hair, wore jeans, and in her own words, did "a lot of things to piss a lot of people off."

On April 24, 2015, Sabeen was shot and killed in her car. I went to her wake held at T2F, crowded by loved ones and acquaintances who admired her. Her murderers were eventually caught, and admitted to targeting her for her feminism and politics.

A decade went by before I visited again, in February of 2025. I spent most of my time in the Sindh capital, and the remaining part in Hunza valley in the Karakoram mountains, along with a few friends from Karachi. In Karachi, lot of things had changed: a new generation of kids had come up in the scene, less scared of being outwardly queer or trans. New venues and art galleries had opened up (there is a techno scene in Karachi now), and with it, a bigger audience for contemporary art. A friend of a friend started an all-women soccer team. My friends said it was baby steps.

On cloudless evenings – of which there are many – Karachi's black kites circle the abandoned high-rise buildings of Clifton Beach that had been left to crumble halfway through construction, looking for a shaded spot to cool down. On one such evening, while sitting by myself on the rooftop of my friend Humayun's house, I felt Sabeen everywhere.