About
Ali Shariq Jamali (born in Pakistan; lives and works in Vancouver) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher. He holds a BFA from the National College of Arts and an MA in Art and Design Studies from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Contemporary Arts at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University.
Ali Shariq’s work has been presented at public and private art institutions and independent platforms in Pakistan, Canada, and internationally. Recent presentations include the solo exhibition Fragment Index: DA · AUSH · KU at THIS Gallery; Wajood-e-Irtika: What Remains After Erasure at Audain Gallery, Vancouver; and Non-Functional Thoughts, an online pavilion presented as part of The Wrong Biennale. Other exhibitions include the site-specific Factory Project at Chawla Industries, And the Story Goes On at Alhamra Art Gallery, Flower of a Blue Flame at Canvas Gallery, and Karachi ArtFest at Sambara Art Gallery. He was a researcher and part of the conceptual development team for EART: A Manifesto of Possibilities, a project by Rashid Rana presented at Manchester International Festival in the United Kingdom. He has also been the Artist in Residence for VASL Artists' Association Taza Tareen 13 Residency, karachi.
Ali Shariq’s interdisciplinary research and artistic practice examine the fragmented, repurposed, and forgotten dimensions of memory, with particular attention to digital memory, cultural amnesia, archaeology, and the material conditions of technological mediation. Working across site-specific and multimedia installations, photography, video, and sculpture, his work considers how memory is externalized through objects, images, archives, computational systems, and cultural institutions, and how these systems determine what is preserved, reconstructed, made visible, anticipated, or erased. He approaches memory not as a stable archive of the past but as a technical and cultural process that is continually reorganized and contested. In his current research, Mohenjo-daro, a major city of the Indus Valley Civilization, becomes a site of conceptual excavation; within this broader inquiry, he examines the relationships between archaeological fragments, undeciphered histories, digital reconstruction, environmental deterioration, and the contemporary politics of visibility, heritage, and inheritance.