Razi Uddin
- Mar 11
- 4 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Islands Project (IP): Thank you for joining us for this talk. Please tell us about yourself.
Razi Uddin (RU): My name is Razi Uddin. I’m a filmmaker and a visual artist, originally from Karachi. I’m currently based in Hamburg.
IP: In your work “A Train to Home” (2019), you mainly talked about the communities in Karachi, which were forced to relocate due to a railway revitalization project by the government. Now you’ve moved to Germany, which means that you are far from the communities and places you are familiar with. How did this influence your work?
RU: From Karachi, I moved to Leipzig in 2023 to join the residency program at “Halle 14, center for contemporary art”, which is located at Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei. The building was a cotton mill in its early days. The whole area is now renovated to offer spaces for art and other creative industries. During this residency, I managed to create two works, which are connected to my memories back home.
IP: So you’ve continuously worked on your own story telling, rather than starting to work on completely new works inspired by Leipzig.
RU: Yes and no. One of the works is called “Ingredients of Identity” (2023), in which I tried to trace back how my grandmother used to cook. It’s not about reminiscing about the past but, through this, I realized that the food she made reflects rich culture and is being lost. And I reflected on this story in Leipzig, after my relocation, so in a way it was my attempt to find a new home away from home. The other work is “Layers of Identity” (2024). In this film, I talked about the migration from India to Pakistan after the partition of the Indian subcontinent, from my own family’s perspective. I also included the views of Leipzig in the work too, which shows the viewers different aspects of these two cities and similarities. So the work was not only about Karachi.
IP: How were people’s reactions? They might not be necessarily familiar with this part of history between Pakistan and India.
RU: It was good actually. I saw people staying in the exhibition space for a long time watching the film.
IP: The topic of changing borders and migration is probably a familiar experience for the German audience, too. And how did you find your life in Leipzig?
RU: I found it’s a nice city to live in as an artist. I felt there was more room to breathe, in comparison to Karachi. It has potential.
IP: Why do you think you felt that way?
RU: In Karachi, I felt I was different from others.
IP: As a queer artist?
RU: Not really. It’s more about the fact that I’m a descendant of the Muhajir people, I guess. After the separation of Pakistan and India in 1947, many Muslims moved to Pakistan, in fear of being a minority in the Hindu-majority India. Those Muslims are called Muhajir. I call Karachi my home, but I think my identity or relationship with Pakistan is complicated. It’s interesting that in Europe I met people from India and we can chat more freely. Although our languages are different, Urdu in Pakistan and Hindi in India, they are mutually understandable. The written forms are totally different though. As the relationships between the two countries are tense, I didn’t get much contact with Indians in Pakistan.
IP: So your family, more specifically your grandparents’ generation, underwent this migration.
RU: Yes. British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe, a man who had never even been to the Indian subcontinent, drew the borders and caused all the migration.
IP: More recently in 2025, you joined this group exhibition at ifa-Galerie Berlin, entitled “Once We Were Trees, Now We Are Birds”. You exhibited a still image from “Layers of Identity”. In the image, you’re sitting naked, surrounded by bushes. It seems you’re looking over water. And there are yellow Urdu words on the image. What do they say?
RU: The text “میں آزاد نہیں؟” can be translated as "I am not free?”, or "am I not free?". It depends on how you perceive it. That place, and also the situation, were important for me for a few reasons. First, I wanted to be near a body of water. I come from a coastal city and have always tried to be around the sea, but have also tried to cross the sea. I did so eventually, to leave home. Also, being naked, and this feeling of letting go that I had in the situation, were important to me. Yet still the question remains in my mind: am I really free?
IP: And what you wrote in the short description next to the work was quite profound and memorable. Let’s take a look at it here. “Turning to look at life back home, where I spent 31 years, I find that, towards the very end of it, I couldn’t really recognize myself - I couldn’t even look at myself… I never knew what it would feel like to be truly free, but it’s clear that freedom is not the same for everyone here…”. Your works, together with what you have told us in this interview, vividly show this sense of being uprooted, in a real way. And to make things even more complicated, the world keeps changing, too. This poses the question of how one can maintain cultural identities and also find freedom at the same time. You called Leipzig home for a year and then you moved to Hamburg. How did that come about?
RU: The bureaucratic system is a little complicated here, and it took a while for me to figure out how to find the next step as a freelancer after the residency program. I also did another one-month residency at Kombinant in Leipzig, but basically now I’m now based in Hamburg, working for a short film festival called “Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg”. I’m going to curate a program and bring more films from Pakistan to Germany.
IP: That's fantastic.
For more information on Razi Uddin, please visit -
Instagram @razissance
Website raziuddin.com
The interview was conducted in 2025.
