Khwaab Tanha Collective

About the Actant

Shiraz Husain, is a multidisciplinary visual artist, whose practice includes free-hand drawing and graphic design, Shiraz is also a musician. Shiraz is the founder, conceptualizer, artist, and the sole force behind of Khwaab Tanha Collective. The collective works through the format of poster art to popularize literature and poetry from Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and other languages. The collective's work has proliferated the public sphere through poster art of literary icons, such Manto, Jaun Elia, Pash, Amrita Pritam, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Jorge L Borges, Sahir Ludhianvi, Dinker and Mirza Ghalib. Currently the poster archive consists of more than 500 hundred writers. Shiraz is also a children's book illustrator and has taught applied arts for many years at Jamia's Fine Art Department. Currently, he is working on a children's book on Mirza Ghalib, developing food recipes, making posters for the Shaheen Bagh protests and curating the Saiyidan Manzil Session at Jamia Nagar.

Connecting the Lines will continue the work of the collective, through different incidents: a two day adda on reading poetry together, rendering new posters, attempting to proliferate the public sphere - metros, buses, walls of the city - with the posters that are created and poetry in Hindi and Urdu. The collective will also collaborate to create new work in Bangla, Marathi, Gujarati, Assamese...letting poetry and posters fold everyone into the moment, into the incident.