Four Acts of Recovery
Single-channel video. 17:36 minutes
(2025)
Four Acts of Recovery follows a fisher family from the Indus Delta of Pakistan as they turn to drawing and painting to navigate infrastructural violence and climate collapse. Displaced from their ancestral Mul creek to the city of Karachi, the family searches for ways to sustain sacred relations to shrines and to homelands that are rapidly disappearing as the sea advances. As the delta is submerged, the work traces how visual practices are mobilised within coastal communities to generate new forms of devotion, dissent, and belonging. The film connects mural paintings of shrines, rivers, and sea to Islamic traditions of drawing talismans for protection and recovery. Image-making becomes both archive and ritual, making space for the abundance of sacred and ecological worlds amidst erasure.
The video work was commissioned by the Han Nefkens Foundation – the South Asian Video Art Production Grant 2023, in collaboration with Para Site, Hong Kong; Prameya Art Foundation, Delhi, India; Nottingham Contemporary, UK; Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, UAE; and Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium.
“Four Acts of Recovery”, Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (2025). Curated by Mio Harada. Photo by Shunta Inaguchi