The works in this exhibition take Mohenjo-daro, a cosmopolitan city of Indus Valley Civilization (3300 BCE to 1300 BCE), as a site of inquiry and as an epistemological condition. A civilisation whose script remains undeciphered, whose social structures remain speculative, whose wholeness is permanently out of reach. The objects that survive it do not resolve this unreachability. Their existence is relational, contingent, and suspended. Present without being legible, holding no specific reality, belonging to no singular memory.

eBay becomes, in this work, a critical space of observation. Its index of Mohenjo-daro artifacts, listed, priced, decontextualised, exposes what Bernard Stiegler identified as the crisis of tertiary retention: the exterior memory object severed from the temporal accumulation that made it meaningful. In the museum, time gathers around the artifact, it becomes situated, interpreted, and relational. On eBay, that time is stripped away. The object becomes instantly available and completely unmoored. It is the loss of the conditions under which memory becomes possible.

The chroma green surfaces in this work operate within that same logic. The artifact becomes a programmable placeholder, a surface where memory is no longer preserved but continuously rewritten, composited, and reconstructed. The Pharmakon reveals itself: the same object that preserves simultaneously dissolves.

In this exhibition, what survives is not the image but its residue, a form that persists precisely by becoming partially unreadable. To stand in this space is to be close enough to sense intention, but unable to fully enter meaning. It means losing your temporal footing. You cannot locate these objects in time, in ownership, in significance.

These objects no longer function as traditional carriers of cultural memory but exist instead as floating traces, shaped more by systems of exchange, visibility, and desire than by lineage or context.

The fragment is all there is, and the fragment is enough.

MEDIUM

air dry clay, paint

ARTIST BIO

Ali Shariq Jamali is a visual artist and educator born in Pakistan. He completed his BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2018. Ali Shariq then went on to pursue and complete his MA in Art and Design Studies from Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, Pakistan, in 2021.

​Ali Shariq’s work has been exhibited extensively at various private and public art institutions, including Wajood-e-Irtika: What Remains After Erasure at Audain Gallery, Vancouver 2025, The Wrong Biennale, Non-Functional Thoughts Online Pavilion 2025, a site-specific ‘The Factory Project’ at Chawla Industries in 2022, ‘And the story goes on’ at Alhamra Art Gallery in 2022, ’Flower of a Blue Flame’ exhibition at Canvas Gallery in 2021, and ‘Karachi ArtFest’ at Sambara Art Gallery in 2021. He was also a researcher and part of the conceptual development team EART: A Manifesto of possibilities a presentation by Rashid Rana at the Manchester International Festival in the United Kingdom. Additionally, Ali Shariq has also been the Artist in Residence for VASL Artists’ Association Taza Tareen 13 Residency in Karachi. Alongside maintaining a studio practice, Ali Shariq has been actively engaged in art education, teaching as visiting faculty at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, Pakistan, and as a Teaching Assistant at School For The Contemporary Arts, SFU, Vancouver.

​Ali Shariq’s practice uses simple yet compelling analogies to explore oppositional thinking, contrasting fixed concepts with new possibilities by engaging phenomena, people, and their environments. His Material rationale and approach span site-specific installations to drawings on paper, painting, video installations, Sculptures, and photographic works. The current direction of his research examines the fragmented, repurposed, or forgotten aspects of memory, focusing on the intersections of digital memory, cultural amnesia, and the materiality of technological mediation. Often blurring the boundaries between presence and absence, the tangible and the immaterial, his work critically investigates how memory is externalized, manipulated, and erased within material, technical, and digital systems.

Currently, Ali Shariq is pursuing a PhD in Contemporary Arts under the supervision of Professor Judy Radul at The School for Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.