Huma Gupta

Assistant Professor

Huma Gupta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at MIT in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. She is an urban and architectural historian affiliated with the History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture + Art group and the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. Dr. Gupta's research broadly addresses the historical emergence of hierarchies and pathways towards dismantling them. Her scholarship historicizes and theorizes hierarchical systems that span urban housing (the 'problem' of informality and the migrant), theories of development (the macroeconomic devaluation of rural housing), and the climate crisis (sustainable building practices and decolonial ecologies). Moving from critique to intervention, her practice challenges hierarchical systems through epistemic and policy interventions, e.g. archival research that center other human and more-than-human subjects, challenging dehumanizing representation of rural migrants and marsh inhabitants through documentary filmmaking, international policy advocacy to better address land, tenure, and water rights of marginalized groups.

Her first book project The Architecture of Dispossession theorizes the relationship between state-building and dispossession through architectural transformations of migrant reed and clay dwellings in 20th century Iraq. And her second book project Dwelling and the Wealth of Nations is an intellectual history of twentieth century macroeconomic calculation debates between economic statisticians from Iraq, India, the US, and UK on the economic value of rural housing. Her scholarship has been published by the Journal of Architectural Education, International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, MIT Press, and Yale University Press.

Dr. Gupta holds a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture and a Master's in City Planning from MIT. Previously, she was the Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at Brandeis University, Humanities Research Fellow at New York University-Abu Dhabi, and International Dissertation Research Fellow at the Social Science Research Council. Dr. Gupta's courses include Dwelling & Building: Cities in the Global South (lecture course), Archive Fever: Theory and Method (seminar), Decolonial Ecologies (seminar), Climate Futures, Cities Past (Filmmaking workshop), Earth, Reed & Water (seminar), Environmental Histories of Architecture (undergraduate lecture course) and Architecture & the Wealth of Nations (seminar).

As a practitioner, Dr. Gupta has worked on infrastructure projects in Afghanistan, municipal planning in Syria, eviction prevention and homelessness in the greater Boston area, and humanitarian response to housing needs for persons displaced due to climate, conflict, and development projects around the world. And she is currently producing a feature documentary film titled 'She Was Not Alone' about a nomadic woman fighting to stay with her beloved animals in the rapidly disappearing Iraqi marshes. The film project, directed by Hussein al-Asadi, has received awards from the 80th Venice Film Festival's Final Cut Lab, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Doha Film Institute, Arab Center for Arts and Culture, Red Sea Film Festival, El Gouna Film Festival, and was a finalist for the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund. It is scheduled to premiere in 2025.

Projects

JAE 2024 | 'May our Egos Die so that the World May Live': Film, Climate, Pedagogy

Huma Gupta's image-based essay reflects upon the her experience of running an experimental filmmaking workshop titled Climate Futures, Cities Past in the spring of 2023 at MIT’s School of Architecture featuring stills from four student films set in Greece, Italy, Pakistan, and Syria. It explores how architectural pedagogy can intersect with filmmaking to offer a critical space outside the studio or seminar paper. Engaging eco-critical and narrative approaches of Stefanie K. Dunning, Jennifer Fay, Ursula K. Le Guin, Donna Harraway, Saidiya Hartman, Adrian J. Ivakhiv, and Ousmane Sembène, it explores how ‘cinema might teach us to die’ or rather, embrace a different eschatological paradigm that moves beyond individual authorship, accomplishment, and post-mortem legacy towards more mutualist, collectivist, and anarchic models of existence. It argues that filmmaking as inquiry can offer a way to collect different kinds of stories that help facilitate the messy, uncomfortable, and wildly creative processes of unworlding and reworlding.

MIT 2024 | Visual Artists, Technological Shock, and Generative AI (Gupta, Jones, Ritchie)

Huma Gupta, Caroline A. Jones, and Matthew Ritchie write that the impact of generative AI (GenAI) programs on visual art is comparable to earlier historical moments of technological shock, when literary and visual artists grappled with unprecedented reproductive tools such as the printing press, photography, and cinema. Metabolizing the shock of those once radical inventions eventually yielded great bursts of artistic innovation. Yet, unlike those prior revolutions, the current one presents a deeper threat to artistic innovation by smoothing its source material into endless variants of seamless pastiche. By definition, the corpus of imagery currently being scraped for training already exists—it is overwhelmingly photographic, representational, and Western-hemispheric. As a result, algorithmic aesthetics visually echo the hundred-year-old art movement of Surrealism at its most banal. GenAI thus jeopardizes a singular function of visual artists in contemporary culture: to continuously innovate never-before-seen forms, artistic movements, styles, cognitive concepts, and theories of representation. Moreover, GenAI is a cultural technology. Since generative programs make secondary and tertiary materials by inputting their own outputs, they both intensify the bias found in the corpus and bury ever deeper the historical sources of that bias, neglecting significant future markets and constituencies who could be welcomed in to build richer archives with better metadata. We argue that more inclusive and transparent training sets, permeable models, and significant investment in what we call “public intelligence” can better shape the potential of GenAI tools, confronting technological shock in ways more likely to encourage rather than dampen artistic innovation for the public good.

Yale 2023 | Book Chapter in The Environment and Ecology in Islamic Art & Culture

Huma Gupta publishes a chapter titled "Visualizing the Marshes in Mayzara: A Material History of Urban Wetlands in Baghdad" in a new book published by Yale University Press. The Islamic world finds itself increasingly at the epicenter of our escalating climate emergency, both as a locus of the petrochemical industry and as home to extraordinary landscapes in which the effects of environmental transformation are acutely felt. Yet, far from a solely twenty-first-century concern, engagement with changing, and often extreme, natural conditions has long characterized Islamic art and architecture in the central Islamic lands and beyond into the Muslim diaspora. This new book brings together a diverse group of scholars and critics whose contributions address this profound ecological awareness through the dual lenses of Islamic culture and climate change.

Exhibition 2023 | Iraq: Beyond the Two Rivers

Iraq: Beyond the Two Rivers (Oct 6-Nov 3 @ MIT Keller Gallery) is a transhistorical meditation on architectural ambition, great migrations, urban design, climate change, and the radical promise of other ways of dwelling and building in today’s world. This exhibition is inspired by Dr. Huma Gupta’s fifteen years of architectural research on Iraq for her forthcoming book The Architecture of Dispossession. It puts artworks by renowned contemporary Iraqi artists in conversation with works Gupta commissioned and produced with a team of MIT students. The exhibition takes viewers on a multimedia journey through a video art piece by Sama Alshaibi set in Iraq’s marshes, an animation by Sadik Kwaish Alfraji set in Baghdad’s migrant neighborhoods, film stills from Hussein al-Asadi’s forthcoming documentary, a photograph by Mohanad al-Sudany focused on indigenous buffalo-breeding communities, an architectural model composed of reeds, earth, and cement by Bella Carmelita Carriker, and a large mixed media mural with archival video by Huma Gupta, Hajar Alrifai, and Mahwish Khalil.

2023 | Climate Futures, Cities Past Film Premiere

Prof. Gupta designed and taught a workshop where architecture students developed, shot, and edited 6 original short films set in Nasib, Syria, Caggiano, Italy, Tameslouht, Morocco, Drama, Greece, Lahore, Pakistan, and Kajaran, Armenia. Each film narrates climate stories from landscapes + places that have been deemed marginal, specifically showing how water scarcity, mining of copper, extraction of marble, urbanization of riverscapes, and shifting relations to the land across generations are experienced and addressed by resilient communities of miners, olive farmers, factory workers, shepherds, bedouin goat herders, boatmen, and potters. The student-directors were Hajar alRifai ("Dear Granddaughter: Tales of Drought from Syria"), Maria Gabriela Carucci ("On the Edge of Land"), Yasmine El Alaoui ("Tameslouht: Liminal Greys"), Laura-India Garinois ("Unearthed: The Domestication of Marble"), Mahwish Khalil ("Ravi: Tales from a River"), and Sarine Vosgueritchian ("Looking for Pirdoudan: Future Archives of an Armenian Mining Town"). The films were produced by Huma Gupta with executive producers Meitha alMazrooei and Mahwish Khalil, along with editing consultant Allyson Sherlock.

Environment in Context Podcast

Huma Gupta is the host of Environment in Context, a podcast series for critical and incisive analysis of environmental questions in the Middle East and beyond. It invites guests and listeners to rethink these questions by taking a broad stance on what counts as an environmental issue. Whereas environmental questions in the Middle East are usually framed in terms of security, water, or oil, this series purposefully seeks out a wide array of sources and perspectives in examining important environmental issues across the region. Too often, Euro-American international institutions dominate and depoliticize the conversation on the environment. This series, however, foregrounds environmental justice as a central analytical framework.

She Was Not Alone (documentary film)

Prof. Gupta is currently producing a documentary film titled 'She Was Not Alone' about Fatima, a nomadic woman who lives alone with her beloved buffaloes in the quickly disappearing Iraqi marshes. This film, directed by Hussein al-Asadi, is the first major cinematic work that centers the narrative voice and perspective of a woman in the marshes. Fatima lives in one corner of a vast inland delta system, collectively known as al-Ahwar. This wetland ecosystem consists of three interlinked lakes, the Central Marshes, the Iran-Iraq transboundary Hawizeh, and the Hammar marshes. In 2016, these wetlands and the neighboring Sumerian cities of Ur, Eridu, and Uruk became a World Heritage Site. However, we see signs of unbridled extraction, pollution, and politically motivated infrastructure collapse all around Fatima. Moreover, even as tens of thousands have migrated away from the region due to prolonged drought just in the past six months, Fatima’s struggle to stay demonstrates that each potential migrant is not just another ‘climate refugee’ whose complex inner and outer lives can be reduced to a mere statistic. Fatima is neither passive, nor a stereotype. Fatima’s story of self-determination in the midst of ecological collapse thus, offers an indigenous perspective. It shows how people who have been subjects of empire, occupation, or internal subjugation autonomously move forward despite the limitations these political systems seek to impose.

Publications

Huma Gupta

‘May Our Egos Die So That the World May Live’: Film, Climate, Pedagogy

Journal of Architectural Education

2024

Huma Gupta, Caroline A. Jones, and Matthew Ritchie

Visual Artists, Technological Shock, and Generative AI

An MIT Exploration of Generative AI

2024

Huma Gupta

Visualizing the Marshes in Mayzara: A Material History of Urban Wetlands in Baghdad

Yale University Press