‘What do the trees tell us?’ is an inquiry into Lahore’s identity as a city of gardens.  Presented as a video diptych, it moves into the preserved gardens and the ruins of what were once gardens. The video’s narrative contemplates the significance of empire and colonialism, and the path that Lahore has embarked upon towards modernity. There are flexible shifts through time and space, reality and memory, past and present, dream and desire. As the video develops, we begin to feel the weight of history, memory, and nostalgia as it impacts those who live in the city of Lahore, and call it home. 

Hira Nabi works with film, video, archival material, sound, and text to build layers of meaning out of every day events. She works with memory, nostalgia, and daily rituals as an aesthetic trope. Using the camera as a form of archiving, and as documentation of the continuous present, her work is hybrid in its splicing of narrative and documentary. She received an MA in media studies from The New School, and a BA in video and post colonial theory from Hampshire College. She lives itinerantly between Pakistan and New York.