Teaching is an active part of Noori’s artistic practice. His courses combine critical reading, close attention to images and objects, archival research, fieldwork, writing and collective discussion. Students are invited to connect personal and local histories with wider political structures, while keeping the difference between evidence, interpretation and artistic proposition clear. Across film, animation, photography, art and design, the classroom becomes a place to test methods, question inherited narratives and build forms of practice that can move between research and public life.
Animation Against Despotism
Labour, politics and aesthetics
This course studies animation as a transnational form shaped by labour, politics and public institutions. It looks at the Zagreb School of Animated Film, Iran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, the Films Division of India, the National Film Board of Canada and United Productions of America. Through screenings, discussion and practical work, students examine how animation has challenged commercial conventions, represented national identities and made space for political critique. The course asks who produces moving images, under what conditions, and how visual storytelling can address inequality, colonialism and cultural representation.
Contemporary Ar(t)chaeology and the Prosopagnosia of History
How can artistic research work with what an archive leaves incomplete? Contemporary Ar(t)chaeology brings artistic methods into conversation with archaeology, microhistory and postcolonial critique. The course examines the “face blindness” of official history: its tendency to lose singular people, minor events and difficult evidence. Students work with archives and objects, including material connected to maritime trade and the East India Company, to develop careful forms of historical inquiry. The aim is not to repair the past with fiction, but to make absences, limits and competing interpretations perceptible.
Landscape of Imagination
This course begins with itinerant photography and painted studio backdrops in Karachi and Lahore after the Second World War. It follows the camera known in Urdu as the “Soul Catcher” and asks how photography, painting, migration, labour and colonial art education met in everyday image-making. Students read archival photographs as social objects rather than neutral documents. Research moves between image analysis, oral history, urban observation and practical experimentation. The course creates a shared space for rethinking how modernity was pictured, performed and remembered in South Asia.
Postcolonial Theories and Decolonial Practices
This course connects postcolonial theory to artistic practice. It treats colonialism not as a finished period, but as a structure that continues to shape institutions, borders, economies and ways of seeing. Students work with essays, films, photographs and situated research, then develop projects that connect personal history with wider social and political conditions. Autoethnographic writing is used as one method among others, with attention to its limits and responsibilities. The course asks how decolonial practice can change not only what artists address, but how knowledge is produced and shared.
The Object in the Mirror
Politics and ethics in art, design and media
Designed for students developing an independent practice, this course follows objects across art, design, media and public space. It considers humanitarian design, representation, borders, climate justice, inequality and states of exception through historical, theoretical and practical work. Site-specific research in Karachi helps students understand how materials and images participate in political life. The central questions are direct: What makes an artwork political? What ethical responsibilities accompany representation? What happens to an object, an image or an idea when it crosses a border?
Necromancy and Artistic Research
A decolonial approach
Necromancy is used here as a speculative artistic-research method for approaching lives and histories that remain only partially documented. Students begin with evidence, identify what cannot be known and develop work at the threshold between archive, inference and imagination. The method does not claim to speak for the dead or reconstruct a final truth. Through microhistory, storytelling, performance and moving-image practice, the course asks how artists can encounter historical absence without turning it into possession. Ethical attention to voice, power and uncertainty remains central throughout.
