Zinnia Naqvi’s “Heart-shaped Box” Video Installation @ Museum London

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Zinnia Naqvi’s video installation Heart-shaped Box (2016) draws from personal archives, including home video footage, music posters, and pop culture from the mid-1990s, after the artist’s family immigrated from Pakistan to Canada. Here, the camera remains in the family’s home, showing the artist and her siblings singing along to grunge music. These scenes present people on their own terms, pushing back against earlier image traditions that reduced colonized individuals to objects of study or spectacle. Heart-shaped Box is featured in Biscuits and Empire: Reframing Colonial Photography, a Museum London exhibition that places Naqvi’s work in dialogue with colonial photographs of British India from the Museum’s collection. Moving between archive and home video, the installation unsettles familiar ways of seeing, opening space for complexity, contradiction, and reimagined narratives beyond the colonial frame.

Links

• Biscuits and Empire museumlondon.ca
• Ontario Culture Days Website onculturedays.ca
• Learn more about "Heart-shaped Box" onculturedays.ca
• Museum London museumlondon.ca

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Ontario Culture Days

Ontario Culture Days is a not-for-profit organization that celebrates artists and cultural groups across the province. Through an annual festival that champions arts, culture, and heritage, we connect the public with local creators while highlighting the rich diversity of Ontario’s cultural sector. Operating at the local level, we empower diverse organizers from small hamlets to large cities year-round by providing high-impact resources and networking opportunities.

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