Fieldnotes/textures
Mixed-media installation, Koel Gallery Karachi
with Zahra Malkani
(2017)
The installation engages with the politics of research, representation and ethnographic work. It makes visible the various research methods we used to create an archive around development, displacement and marginalization of indigenous communities in the city. Institutionalized histories and state archiving are key sites and practices of state forgetting, and our own desire to document and archive emerged in response to this wider state-sanctioned erasure. However, in this installation, we grapple and unpack our own archiving impulses, acknowledging our own positionalities, entanglements and obscuring visions.
The first iteration of this installation was developed for the Urbanities conference and exhibition organized by Goethe-Pakistan and the Lahore Biennale Foundation, 2016.
