Introduction
about
Photo by Mahwash RahmanSehba Sarwar is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. Raised in Karachi, Pakistan, she spent the first half of her life in a home filled with artists, activists and educators. Currently based in Southern California, Sarwar writes and creates time-based art installations, exploring displacement and women’s issues.
Currently, Sarwar is developing a non-fiction narrative entitled What Is Home? that she started while doing a two-year artist residency at the University of Houston's Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. In 2014-15, through a Mid-America Arts Alliance Artist Innovation grant, Sarwar expanded her What Is Home? project into a multidisciplinary arts production, the first phase of which culminated in May 2015. To follow her project, please click here.
Alongside developing What Is Home?, Sarwar serves as artistic/ founding director of Voices Breaking Boundaries (VBB), a non-profit arts-activist organization based in Houston, USA for which she has visualized Borderlines, a series that creates connections between North America and South Asia by generating art production and hybrid publications.
Sarwar's first novel, Black Wings was published in 2004 (Alhamra Publishing, Pakistan), and her essays, poems and short stories have appeared in publications including And The World Changed (Feminist Press, New York), The News on Sunday, The New York Times’ Sunday Magazine and Callaloo. She has also created a series of video collages that have been screened in Pakistan, India, Egypt and the US. In an attempt to document the multiple realities she inhabits - writer, artist, mother, activist, transnational - Sarwar maintains a blog, where she posts images, videos and words.
Check Sarwar's blog, where she posts reflections as well as interviews; view images from her productions on Flickr; and stay connected by following her on Twitter @sehbasarwar