Syed Ayaz Fatmi

For readers meeting you for the first time, what core question does your work keep returning to?

I keep coming back to our growing relationship with technology. It feels like we’re bound to it, like we can’t live without it. At the same time, we’re losing basic survival skills as human beings. In a strange way, it feels like we’re advancing while circling back to a new kind of stone age.

Your statement contrasts online performances of care with real-life empathy. What experiences pushed you to foreground this theme?

You can find millions of videos of accidents, violence, and mishaps online. People shout about them on social media, but very few take action in real life. We’ve become more invested in performing care online than in being social human beings who actually know their neighbors. Day by day, people seem to be getting more self-centered and pretentious.

Syed Ayaz Fatmi | Candy Machine | 2024

Why machines? What does the language of gauges, pipes, and conveyor belts let you say about people that other symbols do not?

Machines are a symbol of modern mechanical life, where everything is time-bound and production-driven. They give me a literal way to express the dilemmas of life in mechanical terms.

You work across motion, interactive media, and still images. What does each medium allow you to do, and how do you decide which form a concept needs?

Each medium feels infinite, and I keep rediscovering them. There isn’t a fixed formula, but usually I start from a poetic angle, then imagine it visually. Whatever feels most effective and natural for the idea becomes the medium. It’s like breaking something apart and then searching for the right glue to put it back together.

Syed Ayaz Fatmi | Doomscroller’S Delight | 2025

You explore cultural identity and evolution. How do your experiences in Dhaka and in the U.S. surface in the textures, objects, or humor of these images?

The cultural shock wasn’t huge for me when I came to the U.S. Gen Z is probably the fastest-growing global culture. It’s full of revolutionary energy, and with such easy access to resources, its potential feels limitless. Humor, especially visual humor, and even the use of language, are evolving in surprisingly similar ways on both sides of the world.

“Insecurity” is one of your themes. Where does vulnerability enter your process or the narratives you construct?

It’s less about vulnerability entering the process and more about the narratives escaping from it. My ideas come from lived experiences and close observations, and the work follows those threads out of the vulnerable state.

Syed Ayaz Fatmi | Hair Saloon | 2024

If one of your machines could exist in the physical world, which would you build and what human habit would it measure or change?

If one of my machines could become real, I’m not sure which one it would be, but it would probably confront our moral and ethical values and the carelessness we show toward our own lives.