In My History Is Your Playground (2017 – Present), Amna Yaseen stages migration as both inheritance and burden. A solitary, faceless figure draped in red stands against a neutral backdrop, balancing an oversized bundle wrapped in fabric printed with repeated images of Marilyn Monroe. The composition juxtaposes Western pop iconography with the embodied labour of displacement, suggesting how global histories rest—often unevenly—upon local bodies. The work draws from Yaseen’s own family history of movement across Gurdaspur, Kashmir, and Lahore, while also referencing broader patterns of invasion and migration across South Asia. Through symbolic colour, concealment, and scale, the photograph reframes history not as a distant narrative but as a weight carried forward.
Amna Yaseen
Amna Yaseen is a Lahore-based visual artist, photographer, and research scholar whose practice moves between social documentary and conceptual self-portraiture. Trained in Fine Arts at Lahore College University for Women, where she completed both her BFA and MPhil, her academic research focused on the development of photography in Pakistan since 1947—an inquiry that continues to inform her artistic approach to archives, memory, and representation.
Yaseen has exhibited extensively in Pakistan and internationally, with her work shown in Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Quetta, Manchester, Rome, Tokyo, Vienna, Cambridge, the UAE, South Korea, and New York. She was awarded the Asahi Simbun Medal at the 77th International Photographic Salon of Japan, and her photographs were selected consecutively for National Geographic’s Your Shot in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Her work has been featured in major exhibitions including the Ras Al Khaimah Arts Festival (UAE), Global Images for Global Crisis at ICP New York, and Asia Triennial Manchester.
In addition to her exhibition practice, Yaseen has contributed to research conferences, conducted photography workshops across Pakistan, collaborated on publications with local and international publishers, and worked on documentary and editorial projects, including assignments for Agence France-Presse and consultancy roles for USAID and WaterAid. Select works are housed in the permanent collection of Ambiance Boutique Art Hotels. Her ongoing series explore themes of migration, cultural memory, displacement, and the symbolic role of the female body within South Asian histories.
