How to eat your cake and have it too: A guide to colonialism

Video installation, 3 minutes, 2022

The past few years have been challenging and slowly took away my will to create art. When I was at a very low point in late 2020, I started baking cakes – not because I thought I would enjoy baking but because I was convinced that eating cake would make me feel better. In that process I started experimenting with making Pakistani versions of cake recipes I came across – partly because I wanted to show my four-year-old daughter that those flavors can be incredible but also because it felt good to be creative again. It was making art just for me and my daughter in a way that also honors where we come from. My daughter now insists on helping when I bake. Having made and eaten copious amounts of cakes, I’ve been making art again. 

In How to eat your cake and have it too, a father and daughter work together to make cake – a western dessert – but make the cake their own using Pakistani flavors like cardamom, rose water, saffron and pistachios.  Filmed to look like an instructional video, the cake making visuals are juxtaposed with narration about colonialism.