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.
Sticky Rice and Other Stories I & II
Sticky Rice and Other Stories is a filmic installation in two parts. It traces a mental map of the region around Karachi, from colonial textile trade to containerised cargo shipping. The disorienting effect of this geography mirrors the effect of globalisation on Karachi’s own locality, which is obscured by the movement of goods from one place to another at ever less cost, less friction.
The first part follows the artist as she journeys to artisanal communities in Karachi to produce with them miniaturised models of historic and contemporary boats. Displayed on the seafront where actual cargo ships operate, the boat models play with scales of production—the singular, hand-made object versus the vast military-industrial projects in the area, where countries like India, China and the United States vie for rail and sea access.
They recall, on the one hand, Manora Island's past as a colonial outpost for Britain and, on the other, the role of the global south port in a new geopolitical order, marked by the New Silk Road and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
The second part of the film shows an artisan cleaning and reassembling a telescope while conversing with the artist. He informs us that the telescope, made with vintage binoculars, is constructed from parts smuggled across the border from Iran at Chaman, through a route that began at the time of the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-89).
The formal economies of oil and war meet the informal economies of second-hand markets and bootleggers in these old scraps, which are then set up for local tourists on Manora’s beach. A piece of the past, the telescope makes its way into the present first as relic, then as technology of vision.
Sticky Rice turns a critical eye on archival work itself and tests the limit of such work against globalisation: what does it mean to negotiate locality when the artwork itself is implicated in, and made possible by, the economy of biennials? What does it mean for an artist to mediate a production-consumption chain? How does craft, far from becoming obsolete, mediate between the nostalgia of tourism and the anachronic potential of souvenir objects, between slow and fast technologies?
Text by Tung Chau
Sticky Rice and Other Stories part I & II Four-channel video installation 13 min., 10 sec. Installation view, 58th Venice Biennale, Pavilion of Pakistan 2019
Sticky Rice and Other Stories Part II, 2019 Still from film
Sticky Rice and Other Stories Part I, 2019 Stills from film