Affan Baghpati (b. 1991, Karachi) is an incisive emerging sculptor and object‑maker whose practice excavates the intimate afterlives of South Asian material culture to make incisive, often wry meditations on desire, memory and identity. Trained at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi (BFA, 2015) and the Mariam Dawood School of Visual Art and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore (MA, 2018), Baghpati moves fluidly between found‑object sculpture, hybrid assemblage and installation, reworking discarded domestic artefacts — surmadani bottles (a small traditional south asian container for surma (kohl), paandaan boxes (betel leaf container), nutcrackers, vintage doll parts and everyday metalware — into formally rigorous, uncanny hybrids that refract histories of taste, gender and migration. Baghpati’s studio practice is animated by a collector’s appetite and a poet’s sensitivity. He combs local markets and municipal dealers across Karachi, Lahore and other cities for objects that have slipped from circulation: items once essential to household ritual and now obsolete. Rather than nostalgia alone, his work stages a critical archaeology of utility and ornament. In the studio these fragments are deconstructed, recast, soldered and recomposed; a Roman Venus figure may sprout a Surmadani, as its head, a ballet silhouette may perch atop a soap‑box base, and a phallic metal fragment may be grafted to a vintage cosmetic container to produce a charged, ambiguous talisman. These juxtapositions convert domestic detritus into sculptures that are at once playful, erotic and disquieting — elegant parables about transformation, desire and the porous boundaries between public history, cultural memory and domestic ritual. Formally, Baghpati’s objects negotiate scale, texture and line with an acute sensitivity to craft. He employs casting, soldering, hand‑sawing and traditional metalwork techniques alongside assemblage and taxidermy, achieving surfaces that retain the tactile patina of their origins while newly mobilized in the service of slippage and metaphor. His work reframes regional material histories — the design languages of household implements, the ornament of jewelry production, the quiet grammar of utilitarian craft — and prompts viewers to consider how form encodes intimacy, gendered labor and cultural memory. Conceptually, Baghpati is interested in hybridity and contingency. His pieces articulate a “third space” where migration, intergenerational transmission and transborder memory cohere into new visual grammars: objects moved from use to obsolescence become repositories of personal and collective histories, and in their recomposition suggest alternative genealogies of taste. Works included in solo and institutional shows — notably Anatomy of a Horny Heart at Aicon Contemporary (New York, 2021) — demonstrate his capacity to animate humor and critique in equal measure. Here, playful eroticism and serious inquiry coexist: a child’s swing painted with miniature tableaux sits above carved, blood‑stained shoes; Baghpati’s exhibition record is robust for a young artist: presentations at AAN Gandhara, Canvas Gallery, Koel Gallery, and Sanat Initiative (Karachi); Rohtas II and Taseer Art Gallery (Lahore); Satrang (Islamabad); Aicon Contemporary (New York); Twelve Gates Arts (Philadelphia) and 1x1 Gallery (Dubai); participation in Karachi Biennales (2017, 2019) and Lahore Biennales (2018, 2020); and a presence at international fairs and institutional projects including Museo Diocesano Carlo Maria Martini in Milan. He has been awarded a full scholarship by UNESCO’s UMISARC and was the inaugural recipient of the State Bank of Pakistan Museum & Art Gallery’s Artist Residency in Museum (2020). Currently a lecturer at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Baghpati continues to refine a practice that is materially adventurous and conceptually layered. His sculptures are more than recovered objects reunited; they are unruly archives — elegiac and provocative — that ask what we keep, discard and imagine across generations.