Mapping Water
2023
20 mins.
4K HD single channel video, colour with sound
Mapping Water critically examines the connection between land, memory and imperialism. In the film we see the artist in her studio; as watercolour washes over paper and dries, the map effectively makes itself. The work serves to challenge conventional cartography while simultaneously questioning it as a faithful document of chronologically recorded time and space.
With ecological research at the centre of her intersecting artistic interests, Khan considers the ways in which geography materialises power while facilitating the collective remembrance of colonial histories.
The nuanced observations of specific locales capture how the passage of time changes both the place and the artist herself; a sense of a map emerges through the script, as well as the wider resonances of the artist’s experience of space and the circularity of time.
The film script draws directly from Khan’s field notes, and offers a way to #rethink the continuities and disjuncture between locations and their entanglements with the monsoon and the climate crisis.
Mapping Water made for the Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present 2023
Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi
Press: https://www.artforum.com/print/202305/siddhartha-mitter-on-the-sharjah-biennial-90443