The Queens Museum presents Umber Majeed: Joy tech (March 16, 2025 – October 5, 2025), the artist and 2024-2025 QM–Jerome Foundation Fellows’ first museum solo exhibition. Joy tech uses speculative fiction to offer a counter-narrative of the Pakistan Pavilion at the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair. Majeed’s multimedia works look at the history of the Pavilion through the perspective of the South Asian diaspora, her ongoing Trans-Pakistan project, and the visual culture of phone repair shops in Jackson Heights, Queens.
Image: Umber Majeed, Search for Pakistan, 2023-24. Pencil on paper. Courtesy the artist.

Taking its title from a tech repair business in Jackson Heights, Joy tech includes an augmented reality experience, 3D animation, video, drawings, and ceramics that employ the language of the bootleg or counterfeit as a mode of worldbuilding. The exhibition’s hand-drawn posters, multichannel moving image works, and 3D animations refer to the Pakistan Pavilion’s architecture, displays, goods for sale, and other fragments of the pavilion that circulate online. These fictional promotional campaigns and reimagined artifacts intersect within the frame of Trans-Pakistan, which is both the title of Majeed’s long-term research practice and the name of a tourist agency that was once owned and operated by the artist’s uncle. While the agency ultimately shuttered due to Islamophobic travel policies throughout the War on Terror, Trans-Pakistan continues to evolve as both metaphor and simulation in the artist’s digital universe.

Calling to mind “South Asian digital kitsch,” storefront merchandising and early web interfaces, Majeed presents alternative sources for filling in the gaps found in institutional archives. The artist explores histories that are in a constant state of redefinition across temporalities, blurring the lines between what may be considered official or unauthorized, authentic or propaganda, legible or opaque.

To further explore how digital tools can revisit the past and visualize futures beyond physical space, Joy tech features a new work for holographic display made possible with support from Looking Glass.

Brooklyn-based Bangladeshi artist and musician Enayet presents a new mini mix as an accompaniment to the exhibition for the Queens Museum’s Interpretation Station. The soundscape responds to the sonic environment of Jackson Heights, Queens and offers a glimpse into classical music traditions of Bangladesh and Pakistan through a lens of migration and mutation. The mini mix, and an opening day set by DJ Zara Dekho, is organized together with Brooklyn Raga Massive’s Ragini Festival.

Public programming for Umber Majeed: Joy tech includes a Spring “build your own pavilion” workshop led by the artist and a panel discussion together with curators, writers, and artists Nora N. Khan, Sa’dia Rehman, and Murtaza Vali forthcoming this Fall.

Umber Majeed: Joy tech is organized by Lindsey Berfond, Assistant Curator and Studio Program Manager.