Henna Hands and its Afterlives is a critical recall of the site-specific project Henna Hands (2003). The soundscape is a mix of ambient street sounds and a reflective recount by Khan. This expanded narrative allows the audience to re-inhabit the work 20 years on and creates a sonic-walk through the city of Karachi.

In the original project, Khan draws silhouettes of the female figure, by using stencil designs of henna patterns with henna pigment applied directly to the walls near the Cantonment Railway Station, Karachi. Khan’s figures are fleeting and transient presences, even before they are fully overlaid by new traces of graffiti and political writing on the walls.

The fraught political history of Karachi and the displacement of settled communities are some of the frictions that this work foregrounds. The walls bear witness to the traces of countless encounters, becoming sites pregnant with memory, despite the constant threat of obliteration of the city’s older buildings by construction mafias.

Henna Hands represents the political role of the female body within the public space and its potential to be a form of resistance. This project poetically reclaims gendered public space and utilises the city skin itself as a site for artistic intervention. In seeking to address an expanded public sphere, Khan enters into a spirited dialogue with the imperatives of urban popular culture.