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.