Narrative Us Recite
by Basir Mahmood
Research & project
Narrative Us Recite is a research project that delves into the remains of Lahore’s once-thriving film industry, Lollywood, which saw a dramatic decline in the late 1970s. What began as an inquiry into how one marks the end of an industry has become a mark in itself—an attempt to produce something that reverberates through the remains of what has been left behind.
For the past eight years, I have responded to the gradual disappearance of resources and studio spaces, engaging with Lollywood not as a monument of the past, but as a space for reflection, response, and creation. In the early stages of my research, the industry acted as a reflective surface for the ideas I brought to it; over time, it has become an opaque space where those ideas disperse. A recent and deeply personal shift occurred after the demolition of a part of Bari Studios—where I had worked for years and planned future works—turning me from an observer of loss into someone who directly inhabits it.
I now see myself as an insider. Even in its ongoing decline and marginalization, Lollywood remains generative in my research. Alongside those still connected to it, we recite narratives of the past that echo forward, practicing forgotten skills together to pronounce ourselves living each time we are forced into disappearance.
Basir Mahmood
Born in Pakistan and based between Lahore and Amsterdam, Basir Mahmood (b. 1985) works with video, film, and photography to create poetic sequences that contemplate embedded social and historical terrains of the ordinary, as well as his personal milieu. His narratives often revolve around everyday objects, gestures, situations, and events, exploring the spaces stretched between identity, distance, memory, imagination, and the melancholy rooted in social inequity and structures of hierarchy. Over the years, Mahmood has developed a distinctive practice that reflects his movement across contexts, and his long-term engagement with the remnants of Lahore’s film industry, Lollywood.
Basir Mahmood’s artistic practice often examines the role and position of the artist through the construction of orchestrated yet open-ended situations. Distance often becomes the primary material in this process, as he takes on multiple roles: as an author who writes scenarios; an initiator who sets in motion collisions between people and improvised encounters to generate original stories; an observer who moves fluidly in and out of everyday situations, witnessing them both intimately and from afar; and a withdrawn subject, such as a disengaged onlooker on a main street.