The sculpture section of Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture’s Fine Arts Class of 2025 presents a thoughtful and grounded body of work shaped by lived experience and the realities of Karachi. Rather than focusing only on form, these students engage closely with the city’s spaces, materials, memories, and emotional life. Their works feel attentive to how people move through the city and how bodies carry history, habit, and feeling over time.
Ruqaiyah Jameel and Affan Tariq both approach Karachi through objects that speak quietly but powerfully about movement, access, and memory. Jameel’s Public? Spaces looks closely at the baluster, a familiar but often ignored architectural feature that controls how people move, see, and gather in public areas. By isolating and reworking this form, she draws attention to how public space in Karachi is shaped by neglect, decay, and unequal access. Her fragile structures echo the temporary and uncertain nature of civic life, raising questions about who public spaces serve and who they leave out.
Affan Tariq’s Memory in Transit also centres on movement, but from a more personal place. Using discarded auto parts from cars, bikes, and bicycles, he creates sculptures inspired by objects linked to early childhood such as prams and walkers. These works sit between nostalgia and loss, reflecting on the transition into adulthood and the fading of childhood memories. Mobility becomes both a physical and emotional idea, tied to desire, escape, and longing. There is a gentle humour in the forms, but beneath it lies a sense of vulnerability that many viewers, especially men, may recognise.
Irsa Imran’s practice focuses on the relationship between nature and the built environment. Through her material choices, she explores how nature is often controlled or pushed aside within urban development, yet continues to assert itself. Her work treats natural elements as active and resistant rather than decorative, pointing to how materials carry memory and power. While rooted in ecological concerns, her sculptures remain closely connected to the everyday textures and pressures of city life.
Zantiana Iqbal turns inward, working through memory, fear, and imagination. Her project centres on Abagon, a fictional monster said to live in the basement of her grandmother’s house. Through this character, Iqbal explores feelings of invisibility and the desire to be seen. The work moves between childhood fantasy and psychological truth, using storytelling as a way to give shape to complex emotions tied to home and identity.
Other works in the sculpture section continue these themes, engaging with ideas of home, repetition, and Karachi’s layered urban experience. Kinetic sculptures and repeated movements draw attention to time, routine, and bodily rhythm, reminding us that sculpture here is not fixed but unfolding.
Together, the sculpture students of IVS’s Class of 2025 show a strong understanding of contemporary sculptural practice. Their work reflects an education that values critical thinking, experimentation, and personal voice while remaining deeply connected to social and political realities. These projects suggest a future for sculpture that is curious, responsive, and closely tied to the world it inhabits.