Fatima's Archives

A few weeks ago, I attended a program at IVS, about which I discussed in my last blog post . One of the tasks that we were assigned during the week on 'Space Odysseys' was to create a piece of art - be it a painting, a write-up, a poem, or a sculpture - based on a space from a story. The story was a ' cassette kahani ', an old-fashioned audio story about a prince and how he risked his life to fight an evil magician and rescue his father. The story, which was in Urdu and was probably recorded at least thirty or forty years ago, was fast-paced and adventure packed, telling a thrilling story of the prince's journey. We listened to the story on the first day of the week, and then were assigned the task of working on an art piece inspired by one of the spaces in the story. We were asked to work on this project throughout the week, and had to present it on the last day of that week. I decided to write a piece of poetry on a scene from the dungeons, when the prince is tr

This month, my siblings and I had the amazing opportunity to spend two weeks at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS). We had joined their Crossover Program, which was a program for students aged fifteen to nineteen years. The full program consisted of four weeks, but students could choose to join any of the courses, so we had signed up for the last two weeks. The first week that I attended – which was actually week 3 of the complete program – was on space and architecture, called ‘Space Odysseys’. It started with an introduction to space and how we see it, in relation to our own selves. There were several interesting presentations, numerous discussions, and even field trips that focused around the topic of space. Although there were a lot of things that we had already seen, this course provided a new angle of looking at them. This course was led by four instructors – Dr. Suneela Ahmed, Ms. Natasha Mukarram, Ms. Rakhshaan Qazi and Sir Usman Ansari. All of them be