Henna Hands and its Afterlives
2020 single channel film 20 minutes with sound
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.
Henna Hands & its Afterlives 2022 Stills from film 20 minutes duration
Henna Hands & its Afterlives 2022 Stills from film 20 minutes duration
Henna Hands and its Afterlives, 2022 Installation view, Pop South Asia, Sharjah Art Foundation 2022
Organised by Sharjah Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi, Pop South Asia is curated by Iftikhar Dadi, artist and John H. Burris Professor at Cornell University, and Roobina Karode, Director and Chief Curator of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. After its presentation in Sharjah, the exhibition will travel to the KNMA in 2023.
Henna Hands and its Afterlives, 2022 Installation view, Pop South Asia, Sharjah Art Foundation 2022
Henna Hands
2002 Site-specific project; Cantonment Railway Station, Karachi Henna pigment paste
Henna Hands is a site specific project located in Karachi.
Khan created stencils of the female body from henna patterns which were installed in different locations in the streets of Karachi.
Khan felt this body of work needed a ‘home’ and a different audience, as it did not belong in a gallery space with limited and selected viewers. Khan wanted the viewer to have a very direct relationship to the henna hands, in terms of scale and the physicality of the object-figure as you could approach it on the street. Where they were confronted with questions different than those asked by a more ‘knowing’ audience. Where associations to the work, came through sight, smell and personal history.
The element of adornment covers the whole body in Henna Hands. The skin or ‘Jaal’ offers connotations of a control that silences. At one level this work merged the idea of seduction and simultaneously turned it into a symbol of subjugation, a sort of ‘sold’ stamp, as we see on the bride’s hand. Desire and submission simultaneously resonate and contradict as the eye is focused on the pattern and the body that surfaces out of it.
Khan followed a different set of rules and the material properties were fundamental in guiding the nature of the work. These materials relied on gesture, the temporal, and the conceptual.
Henna Hands
Site-specific documentation
2002
