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Shoaib Wazir
Transcending pain and beauty. Through my art I symbolically synthesize the patterns of beauty with an equally contradictory proposition of pain to demonstrate reconciliation and transcendence into collective actualization of universal consciousness. I try to accomplish this by a technique I refer to as 'pyroblading' where I employ the sculpting and painting techniques on a burned or traumatic surface. This technique is particularly empowering because it enables me to not only recreate but assign new life and meaning to a traumatic surface. My art practice is inspired by the upheaval and displacement I experienced as a member of a minority population while growing up. My work relates to the migrant and refugees around the world, who must flee war and upheaval and seek new lands to pursue peace and stability. Through my art I try to communicate their plight and hope to demonstrate how a traumatized soul emerging from a burned and wounded past is still able to seek new hopes and new life and completely reinvent itself.
Shoaib Wazir
Pakistan-USA
Fairfield, Connecticut
Save Our Oceans, Save Our Seas
(SOOSOS)
BIO
I am an artist and a musician currently working and residing in New York metro area. My family hails from Waziristan, a war-torn border town between Pakistan and Afghanistan. This is where I get my surname. My family fled Waziristan to seek peace and stability and settled in a town of Bannu, a town in Northwestern region of Pakistan about 65Km from Waziristan, where I grew up. My father, a physician by trade yet a gifted poet and a writer, practiced at a local regional hospital, the only healthcare facility for hundreds of miles. As a young man I spend a considerable amount of time with my father at his clinic and often witnessed first-hand the destruction and devastation that a war can bring to a population. Many Waziristan towns were abolished and leveled by the Pakistani military if not by the US drones to hunt for Taliban. The Wazir population remain an internally displaced population (IDP) living in refugee camps all over Northern Pakistan as their land remain uninhabitable. The plight of IDP's and refugee population around the world is an existential challenge of our time and a cause which I relate to on a very personal level.
ARTIST STATEMENT