Manora Field Notes 58th Venice Biennale, Pakistan Pavilion
Khan represented Pakistan at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
Manora Field Notes is a project in three parts, which includes Durbeen, Hundreds of Birds Killed and Sticky Rice and Other Stories. The project pays homage to the island space of Manora, as it benefits from the expansive research Khan has done over the years in this locale.
From the eighteenth century onwards, Manora served as a defence outpost facing the Arabian Sea. Its many sites of worship – the Shri Varun Dev Mandir, Saint Paul’s Church and the Shrine of Yousuf Shah Ghazi, amongst others – point to the diverse religious history of pre-Partition South Asia.
Over the past decade, Khan has witnessed the slow erasure of the island’s architectural history and natural ecology. These transformations reflect in microcosm some of the larger issues of environmental change, social and economic justice, and mass displacement.
Like the island that stands as a sentry-post, this exhibition is an observation point that produces insights which bear relevance to other sites in the Global South and across the world that are undergoing similar transformations.
Both Venice and Karachi are situated within historical, transnational trade routes, but more interesting for Khan, is how modernity and industrialisation are negotiated within these spaces.
The Pakistan Pavilion was situated within the shadow of the old arsenal, an industrial assembly line, which built warships at an intense pace during the 10C onwards. Khan’s work is engaged with the multiple histories of these sites. At the same time, it moves forward to question ideas of labor and production, optics and erasure, the ocean and its landmass.
Exhibition history
2019 Manora Field Notes was first shown at the Pavilion of Pakistan, 58th Venice Biennale, curated by Zahra Khan and commissioned by the Pakistan National Council of the Arts.
2020 National Council of the Arts and Foundation Art Divvy 2020: Lahore Biennale02, Between the Sun and the Moon, curated by Hoor Al Qasimi.
Hundreds of Birds Killed
Hundreds of Birds Killed is a multi-part installation comprised of cast-brass objects and maps and a recorded reading of lives and properties lost to seasonal monsoons from the year 1939. A copy of India Weather Review from that year - an annual report made by the British to monitor the loss of lives and properties due to natural causes--serves as the starting point for this work.
Obsessive in its detailing of these losses along with barometric readings and wind force, the report reveals the link between natural and fiscal storms. While human casualties are elided, “hundreds of birds killed” stand out as a repeated term that bodes not only ecological crisis but its entanglement with capital. Traditionally, farmers predicted monsoons by observing the blue streaked perti wha bird and how high nests are built.
The colonisers, however, preferred to record the wind and waves on top of Manora Island’s observatory. The death of the birds, then, warns of a rift with the land and its rhythm which precedes disasters. If the report frames disaster in terms of liability and devaluation, the brass objects perform a different action on value. Here, the monsoon was never a great randomiser to be tamed or preempted. Rather, the clusters of boots, spoons, cattle ensnared in twigs, like wreckages after a storm, point to death and debt as being always already uneven.
Made mostly from toys found in second-hand markets in Karachi, they fuse and layer up in ways that suggest fossilisation (turning into stone) and alchemy (turning into gold). Pop imageries of sofas, electric fans, and airplanes, their démodé and kitschy way of life now coated in brass, lend themselves to a subterranean economy of recycling debris and refuse of not just the storm but the market.
The other cast-brass component is the seventy-six tiles that make up maps of cities impacted by the storms. These are produced through lengthy processes of transfer: roads, railways, and waterways are graphed using imaging software, laser-cut as a Plexiglass pattern, and cast in brass by a
local foundry in Golimar of third-generation casters. The labour-intensive process of brass-casting not so much reverses the devaluation caused by the storm as re-routes value through the act of making.
Instead of trying to tabulate and preempt erratic weather patterns, Khan interprets unscalable disasters and loss through material intimacy. As such, the installation tries to bridge two pillars of memory—the document/report and the physical site.
Text by Tung Chau
Hundreds of Birds Killed, 2019 Installation view, 58th Venice Biennale, Pavilion of Pakistan 2019
Hundreds of Birds Killed, 2019 Installation view, 58th Venice Biennale, Pavilion of Pakistan 2019
Hundreds of Birds Killed, 2019 Installation view, 58th Venice Biennale, Pavilion of Pakistan 2019