Rakshas Railways and Unruly Lines
Single channel video. 12:22 minutes
with Zahra Malkani
(2018)
This video explores the colonial resurgence of railway infrastructure as a result of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor – a process marked by re¬source extraction, environmental destruction, death and disappearance. It reads these imperial formations, as well as the resistance and refusal of it, through the materiality and ecology of sites of degraded, decaying, encroached and re-purposed railway infrastructure. The video also focus on acts of railway sabotage carried out by separatists in Sindh and Balochistan, drawing on a long tradition of nationalist resistance to colonial infrastructure.
Supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The project was first conceived as a lecture performance for the event After the Wildly Improbable (curated by Adania Shibli), part of: Why are we here now? A project of Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2017, Berlin.
