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Hum Dono Taxi Mein (Two of Us, In a Taxi)

Osman Bari

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Osman Bari (he/him) is a Pakistani-Canadian graphic designer and writer, based in London. His practice explores cultural identity through language, memory, ritual and kinship. He is also the founder and editor of Chutney Magazine, an indie title that has been sharing everyday stories of culture and identity from underrepresented voices since 2019.

Osman Bari (he/him) is a Pakistani-Canadian graphic designer and writer, based in London. His pra...

This project reconstructs a semi-fictional narrative based on the idea of an ‘archetypal’ taxi ride. It's an experience both intimate and performative, being a rare opportunity for me to be able to speak my mother tongue, Urdu, while living in the West. A scenario in which language serves as a tool of recognition (the driver and I both being Pakistani) but also a barrier, given our varying degrees of proficiency in speech and my weaker fluency in Urdu, typically resulting in the performance of a structured dialogue.

Rather than rooting my relationship with Urdu in personal insecurities, the project instead embraces my limitations by reimagining the experience of the taxi ride as a set of audiovisual fragments — a short film, a publication and a cassette tape. The publication compiles the scripts, structure and translations of the dialogue, and unfolds into the scenography for the film, while the cassette is an uncut record of all rehearsals, notes and soundtracks documenting the process of creating the film. Together, these two props, each with their own specific means of recording and performing language, are activated within the film where the lines between self and character, director and actor, reality and performance are blurred.

In this way, the work is a mediation on how the limitations of language can be expanded through their 'materialisations', and how the mother tongue that I sometimes struggle with can be embraced as a material to shape and imagine narratives.

Final work

  • An angled overhead photograph of a newspaper with an open cassette laying on it. The newspaper features a colourful illustration of a car dashboard.
  • An overhead photograph of an open newspaper, with hand stencilled English words on the left page and a mix of Urdu and English words on the right page
  • A close up photograph of the centrefold of a newspaper, showing part of a car dashboard illustration on the left page and a film script on the right.
Hand holding a coloured image against a wall, text overlaid states Formalities (closing)
  • An overhead photograph of an open newspaper, with a mix of English words and handwritten Urdu words on both pages, rotated perpendicular to the page.
  • A close up photograph of the centrefold of a newspaper, showing fragments of English and handwritten Urdu words
  • An overhead photograph of an open newspaper, with a typed film script on the left page and an illustration of a car dashboard on the right page.

Research and process

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"Basic Exercises"

These set of drawings were the precursor to Hum Dono Taxi Mein, the first step in the process of (re)learning Urdu, investigating my relationship to my mother tongue, and understanding language as a material that can be worked with, beyond simply the content it contains.

The experiments document the process of (re)learning through ‘khushkhati’ (handwriting). It is a set of drawings based on written exercises — termed ‘basic exercises’ in typical Urdu teaching materials — that are used to develop fluency and familiarity with the script and the visual forms that make up the language, now reimagined as tools for composition and image-making. The words included in these exercises are derived from a single YouTube tutorial series that was followed for the duration of the project, from which I was able to practice the knowledge and skills that allowed me to first draw, and then write the very words that eventually make up the set.

From this, I better understood the knowledge that is embodied within language, whether that's bodily, experiential or otherwise, which set the foundation to explore the more narrative qualities of language through the film and continue the self-referential process of (re)learning.

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Hum Dono Taxi Mein (Two of Us, In a Taxi)

This project reconstructs a semi-fictional narrative based on the idea of an ‘archetypal’ taxi ride. It's an experience both intimate and performative, being a rare opportunity for me to be able to speak my mother tongue, Urdu, while living in the West. A scenario in whi...

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