Dawn Images

An isolated, alienated solitary figure, female, shrouded in an oversized and distorted jacket is the haunting image that the music video for Meesha Shafi’s ‘Sar-e-Aam’ opens with. The word ‘Sar-e-Aam’ literally translates to ‘in public’ or ‘openly’ and the video presents the paradox of a woman existing in an inherent void while facing the deafening noise of an intrusive, crowded space. The first track from Shafi’s debut album Khilnay Ko dropped this weekend and true to character, her artistic vision has a voice of its own.

At a time when most music is dominated by hyper-sexualised images of men and women, the protagonist in Shafi’s video, herself, challenges the norm while concealing her body, figure, sexuality and basically, the woman inside. It’s a futuristic image, almost akin to an astronaut in outer space, in need of gravity. The jacket appears inflated, puffed up with emotion and trauma, carrying the weight of the world on its shoulders.

“The whole album in most places is talking about very nuanced emotional themes,” she explained. “And so art forms, like wardrobe and language, writing, architecture and light really capture as best as possible what the song is trying to say.”

What one sees in this jacket curated from graduating student Saad Nazir, in what was his thesis collection at the Pakistan Institute of Fashion Design, is an obvious distortion of size and proportion. It is a surrealistic garment designed with purpose. “I wanted to have multiple careers, so the garment has multiple overlapping faces at the front,” Nazir elaborated on the thought behind the piece. “The faces have been hand drawn and the jacket is reversible.”

The black and white mood board lends the jacket an illusion of being oddly calm, while the manic scribbles reflect external chaos; they’re almost a transcription of physical violence.

“This jacket was fresh off of his thesis,” Shafi added. “When it arrived and I tried it on, it was so big and I looked so small in it. The space that I was in was so big and empty. I felt like a pinhead in it.”

The music video for ‘Sar-e-Aam’ was shot four years ago, three years after Shafi publicly accused a fellow musician of sexual harassment and got caught in an endless legal battle. The two spaces in which the song is shot express the paradox between silence and noise, isolation and overwhelming commotion.

In the video’s second scene, Shafi can be seen walking through the chaos of people and traffic, and this lone female figure is still out of place. She’s wearing a puffer jacket, buttoned up to the neck and more significantly, a helmet. Is it to cover her head, to merge with the burqa-clad women around her, to protect her creative thoughts or to block the noise?

It’s a significant accessory aiming to conceal the identity of a very private woman who has opened herself to public consumption.

“We made this video at a time when I was all over the news,” she recalled. “I was all over the news but not for my work. This [case was] eating up my artistic identity and I did not want to be defined by this only. This album really helped me reclaim my identity as an artist.”