Tariq Alexander Qaiser

A practicing architect for 37 years, an environmentalist, COP27 presenter, filmmaker, photographer, author, and poet. A lover of nature and life.

ARCHITECT:

TAQ is an award-winning firm based in Karachi, a boutique design practice focused on the design of hospitals and schools. Tariq is a founder member of the Indus Hospital, and has been a visiting faculty member at The Harvard School of Public Health in Boston for eight years (2009 to 2017) for the HSPH-CEP program; Airborne Infection Control & Building Design. He has been invited to lecture internationally and in Pakistan.

He has created libraries in buses, retail outlets in Suzuki pickups, and rickshaws. Tariq is deeply interested in traditional wooden boat-building and has designed and supervised large live-aboard Dhows. He has designed exhibition stalls at international and local exhibitions. And has created the Mangrove Exhibit at the MagnifiScience Center for TDF, housing living mangrove plants and water that replicate ocean tidal flow.

ENVIRONMENTALIST:

Taroq has been documenting the Islands of Karachi and their Mangroves since the early 2000s. He spoke, and presented his film ‘A STORY OF SURVIVAL - Replanting Pakistan’s Mangroves,’ at COP 27. He has actively communicated the importance of maintaining these old growths in print, TV, social media, and via workshops.

Over the last three years, he has produced over 200 short films reporting on these ecosystems and the lives they support. These are distributed with notes every Sunday as an open resource on WhatsApp.

Tariq has produced a 30-minute documentary titled ‘A FOREST IN PERIL’ (December 2021) in Urdu and in English, which aired on International & local TV and the Aga Khan University Network. This film was supported by the Aga Khan University, and Voices from the Roof of the World.

Time Magazine covered Tariq’s campaign to create a nature reserve on Karachi’s Bundal Island in ‘The Oceans Issue,’ 4 July 2022, titled ‘Save the Mangroves.’

ARTIST, AUTHOR, and POET

Tariq has contributed his photographs, paintings, and discursive installations in eleven solo and group shows held in mainstream Karachi Art Galleries.

He has authored two bilingual books (Urdu and English): Baltistan Apricot Bloom (2014), & Samandar Par (2017), which contain prose, poetry, and photography. Currently, he is working on a series of books and documentaries on the ecosystems of Karachi’s intertidal islands.