Saniya Jafri

https://www.saniyajafri.com/
Germany (residence), Pakistan (citizenship) °1990
research interests: interaction design, food studies, food design, colonialism, memory practice, archive as creative practice, practice-based research
en
Saniya Jafri is a Düsseldorf-based UX/UI Designer, Design Researcher, and Storyteller. Her practice moves between wireframes and the dinner table, using food as both medium and method. Through playful probes, performative recipes, and speculative storytelling, she explores post-/pre- colonial entanglements, cultural displacement, and the political intersections of technology to surface embedded narratives and reimagine how we relate to the familiar.

research

research expositions

  • ideally, the biryani that brings us all together (2025) author(s): Saniya Jafri published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
    This Exposition is a brief ironic comment on the ongoing degradation, commodification, and colonisation of food and its many dimensions — recipes, ingredients, context — and a reflection on the territorial definitions that shape identity, in this case of South Asians and the Global South, once bound together as a people and still united in the brieftopian world of the Author’s Greatest Biryani: an amalgamative dish of political and cultural reproductions, drenched in time, where old and new contest identity. Through a conversational, autoethnographic lens, the exposition blends historical, colonial, and territorial reflections, using Biryani as both departure point and metaphor for shared identity and dislocation. Visual collages — archival, familial, and sourced — act as probes connecting memory, culture, and belonging. Ultimately, the work offers the Author’s Greatest Biryani as a living document of generational knowledge and a utopian gesture, inviting both insiders and outsiders to gather around a dish transcending borders and time.
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