Tooba Shaikh

Artist Statement

My practice interrogates the way stories travel with migrating bodies, whether human, animal, or plant, and how they fracture, evolve, and reshape themselves in new environments. I am interested in what is absorbed, what is left behind, and what is forced to change in order to survive.

In previous works such as my zines, Bird Spotting in Karachi and Under the Same Shade, I explored these themes through a mix of personal anecdotes, illustrations, and factual research, using the print medium to create intimate, reflective narratives about environmental and cultural shifts.

Working through fictional storytelling, I examine the uneasy space between adaptation and loss, questioning how different lives contend with foreign landscapes that demand transformation. Who decides what is natural and what is foreign? What does it mean to belong when the very act of survival requires constant negotiation? Through my work, I seek to unearth these tensions, lingering in the space between what is preserved and what is sacrificed.

Tooba Shaikh, Reluctantly Naturalized (2025)
Video
Hand-drawn animation, 2'30''

A seed, dislodged from an unknown origin, lands on a construction site in Dubai, a landscape of transition, industry, and impermanence. The plant, newly sentient, begins a process of self-negotiation, shifting its form in an attempt to belong. It stretches, mutates, and reshapes itself, trying to mimic the hardness of concrete, the rigidity of steel, the angularity of scaffolding. But where does survival end and erasure begin? At what point does adaptation become self-destruction?

This animation follows the plant’s futile metamorphosis, questioning the tension between resilience and assimilation. In the plant’s struggle to root itself in an environment designed to be transient, it becomes something unrecognizable — part organic, part manufactured. The work reflects on the uneasy task of belonging in spaces that were never built for permanence.