2023
Mapping Water is an ongoing series of works, encompassing large scale drawings, photographs, watercolours and film. The works take inspiration from the ports and changing shorelines of the Indian Ocean.
Ecological research is at the centre of Khan’s intersecting artistic interests.With the Mapping Water series, she considers how geography materialises power, while facilitating the collective remembrance of colonial histories.
The film Mapping Water, debuted at Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023), speaks to stolen narratives of the ocean and the desert. We see the artist in her studio, developing maps of cities she is recounting; as watercolor floods the paper and dries, the map makes itself. It extends the notion of mapping as a palimpsest that disrupts traditional methods of cartography and with it, time and memory.
The nuanced observations of specific locales capture how the passage of time changes both the place and the artist herself. Under the lens, objects are passed and exchanged: binoculars, driftwood, miniature boats made of shells.
The series of watercolours that emerge out of this film, carry the residue of the text and the visual encounter—enacting a complex field of situated knowledge from specific geographies, text and memory.
Mapping Water نقشِ آب
Mapping Water, 2023 Single chanel video, 20 minutes Installation view Image courtesy ‘Prevailing Latitude’, Siddhartha Mitter for Art Forum Read Prevailing Latitude
Sharjah Biennial 15, 2023 Thinking Historically in the Present Artistic Director: Hoor Al Qasimi 7 February - 11 June 2023
Mapping Water, 2023 Still from film Single chanel video, 20 minutes
Mapping Water, 2023 Still from film Single chanel video, 20 minutes
Mapping Water, 2023 Stills from film Single chanel video, 20 minutes
Sea of impunity - barge I, 2023 Watercolour on paper 50 x 33 cm
Against the land itself, 2023 Watercolour on paper 57 x 36.7 cm
The sea under construction (Karachi), 2023 Watercolour on paper 57.2 x 38 cm
Memory of a city (Amsterdam), 2023 Watercolour on paper 57.3 x 38 cm
For the 14th Gwangju Biennale, Khan presented Unruly Edges, as a series of works that explore the entanglement of colonial history and hydro-infrastructures. The large format drawings and photographic images take inspiration from the expansion of Karachi port and the Indian Ocean and the changing shape of the shoreline. Together, the installation presents abstract and representational modes of thinking about bodies of water and infrastructure. The images are an assemblage of personal experience and historical archives.
14th Gwangju Biennale Soft and weak like water Artistic director: Sook-Kyung Lee 7 April - 9 July, 2023
Unruly Edges I & II, 2023 Installation View
Unruly Edges no.1, 2023 Charcoal and conté on paper 200 x 140 cm
Unruly Edges no.1, 2023 Charcoal and conté on paper 200 x 140 cm Watercolour on paper 107 x 75 cm Photograph 100 x 65 cm