Karachi LaJamia
www.karachilajamia.com
with Zahra Malkani
(2015–Present)
Karachi LaJamia was founded in 2015 as a nomadic space moving outside the institution to explore new radical pedagogies and art practices. We have facilitated a series of site-specific courses and collaborative research projects to explore the intersections of militarism, climate crisis, indigenous dispossession, and knowledge production in Karachi. Our courses are developed in close collaboration with local organisations and activists to build solidarity with ongoing struggles around land, water and development in the city. We have experimented with a range of research and pedagogical methods, resulting in publications, video works, scholarly texts, browser-based artwork, syllabi, workbooks and an expansive archive of fieldwork.
Art and Politics in the City
Open Course (May–August 2015)
At a time of heightened repression and censorship, we organized 10 site-specific sessions in Karachi engaging with the pressing concerns of the artist’s relationship to politics. These sessions created a nomadic and non-hierarchical space for shared learning, shifting between different public spaces to collectively explore possibilities for the politicisation of art in the institution and the city. It was an experiment in formulating new languages, new methodologies, new spaces and networks of solidarity, and new alliances within and beyond the university.
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Gadap Sessions
Open Course (2016)
The Gadap Sessions was a site-specific, research-based course that used visual research methods to document the ongoing struggles around development, militarization, climate change and marginalization of indigenous communities, knowledges and histories in the city. The course took as its starting point the ongoing real-estate mega development project of Bahria Town, which is violently transforming over 35,000 acres of land in Gadap (a vast and historical neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city) and unleashing vast dispossession of indigenous Sindhi and Baloch communities to whom this land belongs.
The course brought together an interdisciplinary team of 13 artists and researchers to collect and produce multiple forms of documentation, mapping and witnessing Gadap as it struggles against erasure – its disappearing and emergent ecologies, new architectures of occupation and resistance, erased histories and persevering struggles. We mapped these intersecting geographies to refuse and contest the imperial visualities and state-sanctioned catographic portrayals of Gadap as a barren wasteland. The course was organized in collaboration with the Karachi Indigenous Rights Alliance.
For more material visit here.
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The Militarized University
Research project (2017–Present)
A research project that emerges from our growing concern with the accelerated policing of university and cultural spaces under the narrative of countering violent extremism. The post-9/11 global political climate has seen an unprecedented growth in the spheres of cultural and knowledge production in Pakistan. This growth has taken place alongside a simultaneous multi-scalar expansion of the Pakistani state-military apparatus into all spheres of life as well as an influx of global capital with similar wartime agendas into the cultural and academic spheres. We trace the ways in which these dual forces have led to a pervasive culture of surveillance and securitisation under the guise of an unlimited war against terrorism.
The project has several forms and iterations, including essays, a lecture performance and talks. Link to essays:
“Imperialism, Art and Pedagogy: Notes on Knowledge Production at the Frontlines” (2017).
“The Militarised University and the Everywhere War” (2018).
“Wild Thoughts: Land and Knowledge Enclosures in Karachi” (2024).
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Hamare Siyal Rishte
Open Course (2021)
However much we may bury and build upon it, the landscape demands to be known. The relationship between the city dwellers of Karachi and the ecology of this land has primarily been marked by violence, both slow and spectacular, and a profound alienation. This course sought to move beyond this painful disconnect into recognising and inhabiting, with care, our profound entanglements and shared destinies with this ecology.
The course explored a range of ongoing struggles from disappearing rivers and the climate crisis, to the razed shorelines and the contested islands of Karachi. These battles to defend the ecological body of Karachi are an ancient and ongoing pedagogy. We learn from Karachi’s rich history of resistance and refusal, turning our attention towards the dynamic, oceanic webs of relation and responsibility our aquatic landscape implicates us within.
Link to essay published in HKW’s Anthropocene Curriculum: “Sensing the Ephemeral Rivers: Notes Towards a Karachi Ecopedagogy” (2021).
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Stateless study: methods and practices for unlearning the state
Syllabus (2022)
This syllabus is a proposal for imagining study as a form of sociality, as a practice for remembering, and as a method for undoing and unlearning the state. Against all the ways in which the university is mobilised as a site for building, imagining and perpetuating the myths and erasures of the nation-state, this syllabus proposes pedagogical methods and practices to unveil and destabilise the violence of the nation-building project. To learn, to witness, to connect, in defiance of the boundaries demarcated for us by the state and its institutions, is the work we set out to do.
This syllabus was produced for the exhibition Proposals for a Memorial for Partition curated by Murtazi Vali at Jameel Arts Center Dubai.
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Ecstatic Ecopedagogies Multi-media installation (2024)
Ecopedagogy is the guiding principle in Karachi LaJamia’s practice, where pedagogy is understood as a mode of connection and collectivity–a practice for building and mending relations with one another and with the environment. Across video, sound and printed matter, the installation shared modes and methods for study as sociality that have emerged from Karachi LaJamia’s ten years of practice. The project was co-commissioned by Rockbund Art Museum and Colomboscope.
“Way of the Forest,” 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi (2024). Photograph by Ismail Noor.