A Smart Cat’s Guide to the National Museum takes the cats seriously as museum users yet highlights their struggle to maintain shelter within it. Beyond its humorous tone, the publication underscores the various disagreements and accommodations that come with sharing the museum space, as well as the fundamentally unequal power dynamics between humans and cats, who can be forcefully removed at any time. The book encourages readers to consider how humans can facilitate coexistence with animals and be mindful of their sensitivities, just as we hope they would be with ours, however odd they may find them.
About the Artist
Sophia Balagamwala (b. 1987, is a multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Karachi. Her practice merges real and fabricated events, to explore questions of nationhood, histories and the museum complex in South Asia. Balagamwala has a BA from the University of Toronto (2010) and an MFA from Cornell University (2014). She has previously worked as the Lead Curator of the National History Museum in Lahore, and is currently an advisor for the Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP).
Balagamwala curates a collection of local artist publications under the Kurachee Reading Room, housed previously at the COMO Museum in Lahore, (2021-2022), and currently at the AAN Ideas LAB (ArtSpace&Museum) in Karachi. She teaches at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture.
