they called it non-lethal
as if the breaking of bone
and the blinding of children
could be softened with language.
a pellet to the eye,
a rubber bullet to the chest –
not meant to kill,
only to silence,
to ruin slowly.
in kashmir,
eyes bloom with metal.
retinas tear like paper.
vision becomes a graveyard
of light.
this is not control –
this is calculation.
this is policy
written in shrapnel,
taught through the lens,
justified through silence.
we stitch gold
where their state leaves holes.
our ruins are not relics.
they are still bleeding.
they do not aim to kill.
they aim to forget.
but even blind,
we remember.
Target Area: Eye
In Kashmir, the act of seeing has become both a form of resistance and a reason to be punished. This work confronts the systematic blinding of civilians through state-sanctioned pellet guns, where the eye becomes a literal target, not just of violence, but of surveillance and erasure.
Today, war is no longer distant – it is microscopic, intimate, clinical. Atrocities live not only in spectacle, on slides, in retinal scars, and the in quiet ruins of the human gaze. The battlefield has shrunk into the lens, where trauma is recorded, consumed, and forgotten.
Onto portraits captured by various journalist (as photographic evidence) of wounded eyes, is stitched golden thread, echoing the Japanese art of kintsugi – the repair of broken pottery with gold. But here, the thread does not heal. It marks loss, dignifies the damage, and reclaims the eye as a site of memory. This is not mending – it is refusal.
Drawing from John Berger’s understanding that what we know shapes how we see, and from Ann Laura Stoler’s idea of imperial debris as “ruins-in-the-making,” this work frames the eye as a living ruin – traumatized yet watching, broken yet recording.
This is not preservation.
This is a counter-archive of the wounded gaze –
stitched into flesh, film, and the unfinished story of Kashmir.
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books.
Stoler, A. L. (2008). Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination. Cultural Anthropology, 23(2), 191–219.
Fatima Zahra is an architect, academic, and interdisciplinary artist whose work moves between Lahore’s urban memory and the poetics of space. She explores thresholds through photography, drawing, and narrative, weaving phenomenology into design practice and pedagogy. As a studio instructor and researcher, she champions embodied learning, critical observation, and the city as a silent teacher. Her art and writing investigate how architecture, history, and imagination entwine to shape human experience.