Naiza Khan has had a constant relationship with the island of Manora which is located just off the coast of Karachi. Manora has a layered history of inhabitation and development with a landscape which possesses various historical and religious sites. This points to a multi-religious social fabric that once existed, a site for Hindu and Muslim pilgrimage, and non-elite leisure. Its everydayness has a different texture from the frenetic urban metropolis of Karachi, while evoking the same urban transformations of decay and expansion that many cities in the religion are undergoing. 

Since 2006, most residents have left the island. For the remaining 3,000 civilian residents, their landscape is formed by urban sculptures; crumbling playgrounds, abandoned apartment blocks, and homes marked for demolition. Manora thus serves as one metaphor for the wrenching transformations in much of the region, where globalized development has yet to begin, but whose rhetoric of technological progress and promise of newness threatens to erase existing sociality.