Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
ABJD and Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth
ISBN: 978-1-953189-08-0
January 2023, English and Urdu, 6 x 8.5 in, 118 pages, full color, softcover
Edition of 300
Design: Vivian Sming
Cover: Hamza M. Iftikar
Printing and Binding: For the Birds Trapped in Airports
With texts by Jyoti Arvey, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Ronak K. Kapadia, Salar Mameni, Yomna Osman, and Abdullah Qureshi
ABJD and Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth is a series of four films that narrates the otherworldly journeys of Faluda Islam, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s alter-ego. Faluda was a fighter in a great future queer-led revolution that liberated the Muslim world from Western and Western-sponsored tyranny. She was killed in a battle and exists now as ghost, zombie, jinn, and alien. She appears as each of these beings in each of the four films while simultaneously speaking to figures from resistance past in an attempt to understand her own story.
The book contains screenplays, film stills, and documentation from Bhutto’s ABJD series, as well as essays and poems by Jyoti Arvey, Ronak K. Kapadia, Salar Mameni, Yomna Osman, and Abdullah Qureshi. This project is heavily inspired by Islamic mysticism and spiritual traditions that speak to loss, memory, and resilience. It is dedicated to Bhutto’s late father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, a grassroots political activist who was killed outside his home in Karachi, Pakistan in 1996.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (b. Damascus, 1990) is an artist and curator whose work resurrects complex histories in the South Asian, South West Asian, and North African region. In the process he unpacks the intersections of religion, storytelling, futurity, and ecology through a multi-media practice rooted in printmaking, textile, and performance. He has shown work and curated exhibitions globally, as well as spoken at Columbia University, UC Berkeley, NYU, Stanford and the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Bhutto is currently based in Karachi, Pakistan and received an MAH in History of Art from the University of Edinburgh in 2014 and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016.