Umber Majeed: The Weary Traveller

J😊Y TECH sends up the superficial, spectatorial ways that Western travellers engage with cultures besides their own

Umber Majeed’s solo exhibition coincides with another show at the Queens Museum about the New York World’s Fair, in which one finds a video examining ‘it’s a small world!’, an Old Mill boatride Walt Disney debuted at the 1964–65 expo. As contemporary viewers can tell from Disney’s whimsical dancing dolls, which are styled as children wearing traditional garments from nations around the world, time has not done the ride’s essentialist optics any favours. Enter J😊Y TECH, an indictment of the superficial, spectatorial ways that Western travellers continue to engage with cultures besides their own.

Majeed’s work frequently invokes a fictitious travel agency called Trans-Pakistan Adventure Services, which is introduced to viewers in Welcome to the Trans-Pakistan Pavilion! (2025), a single-channel video installation that plays a mix of glitchy photo galleries and travel itineraries. Majeed’s ‘agency’ borrows its name from her uncle’s erstwhile business venture, which, the exhibition texts reads, closed due to ‘Islamophobic travel policies’ following 9/11 and the Global War on Terrorism. Repurposing the company into a narrative device, Majeed uses fiction to animate the limited historical knowledge available about the Pakistani diaspora to varying degrees of success.

Visitors ‘time travel’ to sites like the Pakistan Pavilion at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair in Untitled (2025), an installation composed of a three-channel video, a wall decal and a jumbled assortment of small ceramic sculptures. Three smartphone-shaped monitors display paraphernalia ranging from scans of black-and-white advertisements of hand jewellery embellished with pink pearls from Bangladesh (at the time part of Pakistan) to a tribute to the modern artist Shakir Ali, to trifold pamphlets of other midcentury Pakistani tourism agencies, introduced alternately by a chatbot and by Majeed through headphones. Untitled – and the show as a whole – is visually overwhelming and conceptually unmoored, inspiring in the viewer the same sense of malaise that a weary traveller has on a trip gone on too long. Nearby a mixed media work on paper titled Postcard (2024) encourages viewers to design a digital souvenir of their ‘journey’ using augmented reality on their phones; the participants’ resulting digital postcards are archived on an interactive website made by the artist, all of which further compounds the exhibition’s glut of visual excess. It’s like looking at an overflowing suitcase.

Visitors next ‘travel’ to Joy Tech, a real tech repair shop in present-day Jackson Heights, a neighbourhood in Queens, via a group of works on paper and ceramics adjacent to Timeline (2024–25), a floor-to-ceiling wall decal presenting a white iPhone emerging from a wormhole, with further imagery viewable through an augmented reality app on visitors’ phones. A ceramic A-frame sign, WE CAN FIX IT (2025), stands on a fluorescent red-and-white chequerboard platform, while motifs like inverted Apple logos, phones with cracked screens, NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection licenses, CD-ROMs, floppy disks and ‘Have a Nice Day Thank You’ bags recur in physical and digital space, cataloguing a visual aesthetic the press release terms ‘South Asian digital kitsch’. What’s unclear is whether Majeed’s display is a celebration or simply a reproduction of Joy Tech’s ‘kitschy’ aesthetic.

Like Disney’s ‘it’s a small world!’, J😊Y TECH’s sprawling, fictitious tour of past and present Queens seeks to engage audiences using spectacular nascent technologies (Majeed, augmented reality; Disney, audio-animatronics). Both presentations also grapple, rather ambitiously, with the notion of multiculturalism. While Disney’s punchy thesis was stated outright in the title of his boat ride, Majeed refrains from aligning too closely with any particular worldview, choosing instead to leave viewers with a vague inkling of the limits of their knowledge – and a sense of having travelled somewhere.

J😊Y TECH at Queens Museum, New York, through 18 January 2026

From the Summer 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.