FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Twelve Gates Arts is thrilled to present Umber Majeed: Digital Handicrafts curated by Sarah Burney. Digital Handicrafts will be on view from August 7th to September 25, 2026 in Philadelphia at 106 N 2nd St. The opening reception on August 7th will be from 6-8pm.
This exhibition foregrounds the handmade within Umber Majeed’s digitally forward practice by highlighting her drawings, paintings, mixed-media works on paper, prints, and ceramic sculptures.
Majeed’s drawings have unexpected muses: the checkerboard pattern of Photoshop, stock imagery about copyright ironically pirated from the internet, incomplete digital renderings of vortexes and spheres, drop-down menus, fisheye filters, pop-up messages, and icons multiplying as they are dragged across a screen. These are decidedly unglamorous, work-in-progress fragments of digital image-making. Majeed further complicates our viewing experience by bending time and merging her screen-based imagery with the archival: picturesque mountains and catchy slogans drawn from ephemera from her uncle’s defunct tourism company; continents and diagrams of global wind patterns from an out-of-print Urdu atlas; logos and advertisements from a Pakistani newspaper; signage from a glossy new private real estate development franchise; and instructional manuals for cellphone use and maintenance.
Majeed’s choice of materials is similarly subversive. She has created paintings on canvas and ceramic sculptures but shows a clear preference for more modest materials like graph paper, colored pencils, and markers—producing artworks that are playful, beguiling and technically meticulous. Her fusion of digital and archival imagery extends into the augmented reality works for which Majeed is widely known. The exhibition includes one such work, Zoom in, in which a framed work on paper activates an augmented reality experience, allowing Majeed’s analog, archival, and digital vocabularies to unfold together in augmented space.
A first encounter with Majeed’s drawings, prints, and sculptures prompts the question: why render ubiquitous icons, obsolete symbols, or low-resolution pixelated images by hand? Majeed’s eye mimics the digital gestures she is memorializing. She zooms into the aesthetics of digital image-making, copying and pasting its icons and conventions, and then zooms out to expose the mechanics of digital world-building. In her work, this becomes part of a broader inquiry into other forms of world-building as well: the ideological construction of the nation-state, the physical fabrication of luxury residential compounds, and the visual rhetoric of tourism. Beneath their playful surfaces, her layered works carry a sharper charge, asking how images of place, progress, and belonging are manufactured, circulated, and sold.
Viewed unmoored from their ambitious digital environments, Majeed’s handmade works can be understood as a form of handicraft. The term evokes an industry that promotes the culture of Pakistan through rugs, textiles, jewelry, and decorative wares: objects that invoke the artisan’s hand, yet can just as easily slip into mass-produced tchotchkes for locals and tourists alike. Handicrafts do not enshrine a static culture; they continually adapt to changing aesthetics and shifting interpretations of history. In the same vein, Majeed sifts through both digital and archival kitsch, engaging with and contributing to copy culture as she reverse-engineers its most utilitarian images and then embellishes them. In doing so, she assumes the role of artisan herself, handcrafting a memorial to the pixel and a graphic sensibility perpetually on the verge of obsolescence and renewal.
Umber Majeed (b. New York, 1989)
is a multidisciplinary visual artist and educator. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in 2016 and graduated from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan in 2013.
Her writing, performance, and animation work engage with familial archives to explore Pakistani state, urban, and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens. Majeed’s solo exhibitions include; ‘In the Name of Hypersurface of the Present’, Rubber Factory, New York (2018) and ‘Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Facts about the Earth)’, 1708 Gallery, Richmond, Virginia (2021), ‘Made in Trans-Pakistan’, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2022), and J😊Y TECH, Queens Museum, NY (2025-6). She has shown internationally in group exhibitions at Hayy Jameel, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (2024); the Asian Art Biennial at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan (2021); Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, UAE (2019); the Karachi Biennale, Karachi, Pakistan (2017), among others. Majeed is a recipient of numerous fellowships including the HWP Fellowship, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon (2017), Refiguring Feminist Futures Web Residency, Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM, Germany (2018), the Digital Earth Fellowship, Hivos, the Netherlands (2018-19), Technology Residency, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (2020), QM-Jerome Fellowship (2024), ISCP Pollock-Krasner Fellowship (2025), and Eyebeam Fellowship (2026). Majeed is currently a Y12 NEW INC member- Extended Realities Track. Her work has been acquired by several private collections, including the Lekha and Anupam Poddar Collection at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, India. She lives and works in New York, USA and Lahore, Pakistan.
Sarah Burney
is an independent curator and writer based in New York.
Raised in Kuwait and Pakistan, Burney is a specialist of contemporary printmaking and contemporary art from South Asia. She is interested in exploring artists’ materials and processes and diversifying discussions in contemporary art. Her recent and forthcoming curatorial projects include Krishna Reddy: Heaven in a Wildflower (Print Center New York, 2025), Zarina: Directions to my House (STPI Singapore, 2026), and Chitra Ganesh: Impressions of Mythic Futures (Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, 2027) Her writing and curatorial work is informed by the variety of perspectives Burney has gained in the field, including the studio of Zarina, the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, and the Guerrilla Girls. She serves on the Board of Trustees for Print Center New York.