2010-2020

Landscape as an internal, body-based concept

Conceptions of lived time and space are foundational to critical projects of self-formation. This is where the shaping power of place accrues vital force. In an interview with fellow artist and historian, Iftikhar Dadi, Khan speaks in a similar vein of how walking through Manora Island allowed her a wider experiential imprint in her work.

Notions of the walking artist and bodily witness have been discussed within a number of contexts. But in Khan’s work the idea of mobility facilitates, in particular, an exploration of temporal duration. She speaks of a kind of “double time” – historic time as well as the lived present in which the artist finds herself immersed.[i] This phenomenon fuels a key aspect of narrative capacity. For it is at the juncture of lived duration that internal and external space become dynamic, sensually co-extensive, and expressive. Set forth in temporal terms, it is between bodily space and its external horizon that “an exact world...can come to light.”[ii]

[Through it] I am trying to articulate the sense of double time existing in this place, of deep time and the present, both in which I am submerged.” [Khan’s] work proposes an embodied/ gendered, historicised, and landed concept of selfhood, within the tempered framework of landscape. This is perhaps the artwork’s most significant attribute, and that which is capable of quarrying meaning deep within its viewers. Even in its most conceptual mark-making, Khan’s work remains powerfully personal.