‘Chasing Conversations’ is a travelogue recording not a physical journey, but a temporal journey across borders and lost memories.

In this collaborative quest, Numair Abbasi and Mahvash Masood, with each other’s assistance, have tried to trace the history of their deceased grandparents: Abbasi’s grandmother who spent half her life in a city whose name is now obsolete, and Mahvash’s grandfather who studied medicine from an unknown university in Pakistan.

They anchored their research in scraps of clues left behind by their respective grandparent — photographs, letters, and oral lore — to piece together portraits that would bring their biographies to life. Their loving tribute offers a glimpse of the operative and investigative channels they employed to develop a contextual understanding of their cherished forbearers, and invites a broader discussion on our archival practices and intimate memories of loved ones.

For this project, Abbasi and Masood launched a cross-border investigation to piece together the puzzle of their respective grandparent’s past life. It led them to multiple sources through various mediums. While some channels of investigation yielded answers, most did not, leading to even more questions and mysteries.

Comprising excerpts from actual conversations, and interspersed with family archives, this project manifests their process, experience, and fluctuating emotional states during the research period.

It recreates a disorienting and deceptive narrative which defies coherence of time, place, and characters.