In an age of speech restriction and narrative control, resistance in Pakistan has increasingly turned to the visual and performative—to murals, body language, protest attire, and symbolic gestures. As political discourse is squeezed through formal media and censored online, aesthetic resistance becomes a parallel language of dissent.
Posters, graffiti, and placards have become sites of visual speech, conveying urgency, irony, and rage. Slogans such as “Mera Jism Meri Marzi” or “Yeh jo dehshatgardi hai, is ke peechay wardi hai” aren’t merely written—they are drawn, sprayed, stitched, and worn. Typography, color, and composition become rhetorical tools that deliver protest where traditional platforms deny access.
Performance, too, has emerged as a mode of resistance. From students staging theatrical sit-ins to lawyers silently marching in robes, resistance becomes choreography—a careful scripting of posture, silence, and space. These embodied performances reclaim public arenas, reminding spectators that the body itself is a political text.
The 2022 student protests, the Aurat March, and campaigns against enforced disappearances have all leveraged visual storytelling: photographs of victims held aloft, absent faces stenciled on walls, coordinated clothing signifying unity or mourning. These acts bypass linguistic barriers, making protest legible to those who cannot read official scripts or afford digital access.
Importantly, protest aesthetics are deeply intertextual—they cite poetry, history, and mythology. A single placard quoting Faiz or Parveen Shakir may evoke decades of suppressed memory. A painted eye may allude to surveillance. A red dupatta may recall bloodshed, revolution, or feminine strength. This semiotic layering allows minimal text to carry maximal meaning.
State responses to such aesthetics reveal their power. Banners are torn down, murals whitewashed, performances banned. Even colors become controversial. This suppression testifies not only to the potency of image, but to the anxiety it provokes in the state’s symbolic order. The state recognizes that a protest image, once viral, can outlast a speech.
Media platforms, too, engage in the aesthetic shaping of resistance. Cropped photographs, muted coverage, and selective framing attempt to sanitize protest. In contrast, citizen journalists and digital artists restore the full picture—editing with care, captioning with defiance, curating visibility as resistance.
Yet this aesthetic turn is not without risk. The iconization of protest can sometimes commodify it, reducing dissent to hashtags and spectacle. There is always the danger of resistance becoming brand, devoid of sustained political strategy. Aesthetics must remain tethered to articulation and action.
Nevertheless, in a polity where speech is surveilled and representation monopolized, the grammar of resistance has become visual, embodied, and affective. It speaks in metaphors that bleed, symbols that dare, and silences that echo.
To decode protest today, we must read beyond manifestos—we must read murals, garments, poses, and absence itself. In doing so, we recognize that democracy lives not only in parliaments and editorials, but also in the painted wall, the silent march, and the lifted placard.
