Born in Pakistan and today based between Lahore and Amsterdam, Basir Mahmood (b. 1985) is known for using media such as video, film and photograph to create poetic sequences that contemplate embedded social and historical terrains of the ordinary as well as his personal milieu. The narratives of his work are often based within and around everyday objects, gestures, situations and events. They explore the spaces that stretch between identity, distance, memory, fantastical imagination of others, and a melancholy that derives from social injustice and inequity as well as from social structure and hierarchy. Here, Mahmood explores his own position as an artist by adopting multiple roles including: as an author who writes narratives; an initiator who sets in motion collisions of people and improvised scenarios to create original stories; as an observer who teleports in or out of the everyday situations he is observing to see intimately from within and from without; and as a withdrawn subject, for example as a disengaged onlooker on a main street.