Eternal imprints

eternal imprints

Feb 1 – March 28, 2026
The Barracks Museum, Lahore, Pakistan

eternal imprints reimagines ancient rock art heritage as a living climate archive, bringing together ecological data, digital preservation, and multiple knowledge systems across hybrid art, research, and emerging media. Along the Upper Indus River, more than 6,000 carved rocks bearing over 37,000 petroglyphs and inscriptions, shaped across millennia, now face submersion as climate change and human intervention reshape land, water, and survival. These transformations also drive patterns of human displacement, altering long-standing relationships between native communities, landscapes, and memory. What once stood in open air for centuries is becoming a memory held below the surface.

Eternal Imprints emerges from over a decade of research led by Dr. Murtaza Taj and Dr. Jason Neelis, focusing on the digital preservation of Pakistan’s cultural heritage along the Upper Indus River, alongside Faisal Anwar, founder of CultureLab (CL) ongoing exploration of data as a dynamic and living entity in contemporary artistic and knowledge-based practices. The work examines the delicate relationships between climate, heritage, and movement, revealing the cultural and artistic histories and human migrations that have unfolded across generations.

Collaborating Institutions: Lead Researchers Dr. Murtaza Taj, Associate Professor, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan. Dr. Jason Neelis, Associate Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada.

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Research & Exhibition Partners: Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada), UNESCO, USAID, SSHRC (Canada), Waksaw–Uddiyana Archaeological Alliance, Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation (Global), kickstart (Pakistan)

Team
Atiq Hashmi (LUMS), Muzammil Ahmed (LUMS)