Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is a Pakistani, queer artist belonging to a wellknown political family in Pakistan. Zulfikar’s art revolves around the destruction of heteronormative, religious and cultural expectations of masculinity. This image is from a series called Musalmaan Musclemen: a reproduction of a book written by Arnold Schwarzenegger on bodybuilding. Bhutto translates the images in the original book using colorful fabric, thread-work, satin, and floral patterns, contradicting what is normatively considered to be the standard for masculinity with normative feminine characteristics. The result is a blurring of these binaries that have been vehemently protected by those adamant to not think beyond what they have been told. The queering of this standard opens imaginations of new subjectivities—ones that enable bodies with all their layered identities to be allowed to exist in their entirety without being forced to fit into a standard mold or being erased.
o n i s t o n a i s t n a i n i g g a a m i m i d e d z e i l z rraaddiiccaali SOUTH ASIAN-ISLAM-FUTURISM
MUSA
LMAAN MUSCLEMEN ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTO
How do art and imaginations transcend rigid thoughtlessness?
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Studying alternative world-making movements like Afro/Indigenous/Chicana/Muslim/Trans Futurisms reveals new ways of imagining futures—it allows a glimpse into a parallel universe, one where life was not interrupted by colonialism. It enables visions of futures with culturally diverse cyborgs—where technology is not developed to extract and exploit but to enhance kinship; where nature is not an object with value prescribed based on personal gains, but is understood as an entity of its own that cannot be categorized separately from organisms; where identities are not categorized into standardized boxes, but flow freely. These futures are based in story-telling practices—they are fantastical and empowering. They do not ask for a return to pre-colonial times, but are rooted in the histories of resistance and struggles that have defined lived social realities of marginalized groups.
Design plays a crucial role in articulating modes of being in the world. It is a field involved not only in the shaping of matter, but in the shaping of relations, processes, systems; it is implicated in managing who is allowed to inhabit the world, and how. In constructing the material world, design devises nodes of possibility: what could be, and what could not; how things could be, and how could they not. It creates worlds, and ways of inhabiting them. The ramifications of these possibilities reach back, rewriting pasts, reconfiguring presents, prefiguring futures.88 Luiza Prado De O. Martin Image 1 source_ louisesmecruz.blogspot.com Image 2 source_independant.co.uk Image 3 source_zulfikaralibhuttoart.org
87. Lindsay Nixon, “Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurism,” Otherwise Worlds, 2020, pp. 332-342, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11sn1vd.21. 88. Prado de O. Martins, 24.
