Fragment Index
Ali Shariq Jamali
May 1 – 10, 2026
THIS Gallery – 108 E. Broadway, Vancouver
(back alley entrance)
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 2 | 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM
The works in this exhibition take Mohenjo-daro, a cosmopolitan city of Indus Valley Civilization (3300 BCE to 1300 BCE), as a site of inquiry and as an epistemological condition. A civilisation whose script remains undeciphered, whose social structures remain speculative, whose wholeness is permanently out of reach. The objects that survive it do not resolve this unreachability. Their existence is relational, contingent, and suspended. Present without being legible, holding no specific reality, belonging to no singular memory.
eBay becomes, in this work, a critical space of observation. Its index of Mohenjo-daro artifacts, listed, priced, decontextualised, exposes what Bernard Stiegler identified as the crisis of tertiary retention: the exterior memory object severed from the temporal accumulation that made it meaningful. In the museum, time gathers around the artifact, it becomes situated, interpreted, and relational. On eBay, that time is stripped away. The object becomes instantly available and completely unmoored. It is the loss of the conditions under which memory becomes possible.
The chroma green surfaces in this work operate within that same logic. The artifact becomes a programmable placeholder, a surface where memory is no longer preserved but continuously rewritten, composited, and reconstructed. The Pharmakon reveals itself: the same object that preserves simultaneously dissolves.
In this exhibition, what survives is not the image but its residue, a form that persists precisely by becoming partially unreadable. To stand in this space is to be close enough to sense intention, but unable to fully enter meaning. It means losing your temporal footing. You cannot locate these objects in time, in ownership, in significance.
These objects no longer function as traditional carriers of cultural memory but exist instead as floating traces, shaped more by systems of exchange, visibility, and desire than by lineage or context.
The fragment is all there is, and the fragment is enough.
Biography
Ali Shariq Jamali (b. 1994) is a visual artist and educator born in Pakistan. He completed his BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2018. Shariq then went on to pursue and complete his MA in Art and Design Studies from Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, Pakistan in 2021.
Ali Shariq’s work has been exhibited extensively at various private and public art institutions, including a site-specific ‘The Factory Project’ at Chawla Industries in 2022, ‘And the story goes on’ at Alhamra Art Gallery in 2022, ‘Flower of a Blue Flame’ exhibition at Canvas Gallery curated by Quddus Mirza in 2021, and ‘Karachi ArtFest’ at Sambara Art Gallery in 2021. He was also a researcher and part of the conceptual development team EART: A Manifesto of Possibilities a presentation by Rashid Rana at the Manchester International Festival in the United Kingdom. Additionally, Ali Shariq has also been the Artist in Residence for VASL Artists’ Association Taza Tareen 13 Residency in Karachi. Alongside maintaining a diverse studio practice, Shariq was a visiting faculty as Teaching Associate at Beaconhouse National University.
Ali Shariq’s work questions the structure of our reality through the trajectory of perception, employing simple yet unique analogies to approach questions of perception and reality. His practice is an intersection of the multidisciplinary mode of working and the outcome is expansive, ranging from text to sound, installations, mixed media paintings, drawings, videos and photography. His investigations create new debates on the spirit of truth and never cease to question what appears obvious and definitive. He cultivates the oppositional thinking that distinguishes the fixed from new possibilities by comparing and correlating phenomenon, people and their surroundings.
Currently Shariq is pursuing PhD in Contemporary Arts under the supervision of Professor Judy Radul at The School for Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.