After talking with curator Zahra Khan, ASIA also had a chat with Pakistan Pavilion artist Naiza Khan, whose “Manora Field Notes” presents a new body of work that brings together ideas of embodiment, ecology and optics. The exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale immerses the viewer in the life of Manora Island, and part of its history, linked to the history of Pakistan before and after Partition. Naiza Khan has been documenting the island’s material culture, public space and maritime past, and has been witness to the slow erasure of the island’s history and natural ecology throughout her visits. She has collected an extensive archive of images, objects and observations, which are pivotal to her project on show in Venice.
The exhibition is articulated throughout three spaces. The first, upon entering the Pavilion at Campo della Tana, features the installation Hundreds of Birds Killed, which includes cast brass sculptures of 11 city maps across Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. The work is based on the weather report the artist found in the 19th century observatory on Manora Island, listing cities and natural calamities that happened in British India in 1939, as well as their impact in casualties and types of disaster. In the second space are three watercolour drawings from 2015 entitled Cast of a city, while the courtyard features Dorbeen, a telescope imported from Manora, showing a video of Manora Island street life. The third space houses the multi-channel video Sticky Rice and Other Stories, offering viewers glimpses of life and the tourist trade on Manora Island. In this interview, Naiza Khan sheds some light on the project, its origins and what may come after it.
Why did you choose Manora Island as a particular location to research and make the focus of your work?
I have lived in Karachi for 25 years, and Manora is based in the Karachi Harbour. I think one of the reasons why I went to Manora Island was to take some space from the city, because with 21 million people it is a very dense urban space, with a lot of political issues. Manora is only a 20-minute boat ride across the city harbour. The island is more of a recreational space, but it’s also a space I walked through and realised that it had many things happening. I actually didn’t go to Manora to start a project, I would say that first of all. Over the years, I thought… let’s go and see and discover this place, and went with friends, went for a walk, and then I kept going back, and each time I went back I discovered that there was a conversation that was important, or I found a temple, or I found a Gudwara, which is the Sikh community space of worship. I went to the lighthouse and I saw the sense of geography of this place from a certain height, as well as the city beyond it.
So I think that in one way it offered me as an artist a space to get distance, and I don’t think that it’s possible to work ‘inside’ when you’re inside a space as dense as Karachi is. When I got that distance, I was actually able to start looking at my city, which is interesting. The shift in my practice happened then, because I was very much working with the female body, with a very gendered body of work before. And at that time I told a friend of mine, isn’t ironic that I had to leave the city in order to think about it? And I think that is really significant. It seems almost obvious that you need to do that, you can’t be right in the middle of something, which is so intense, and experience it. So this work at the pavilion is in indirect ways also a reflection on ideas of urbanity, about terrain, about development and transformation, about the space, as well as the social space and ultimately, the ecology of lived space.
It is important to know that I went there in a very random, meandering way. I think that walking through a space is a very important part of how this work has been ongoing for me, because it is about going in, with no expectations whatsoever, and then suddenly interesting conversations happen, and that’s how it evolved slowly.
The series is ongoing then?
It’s ongoing in a conceptual sense, because I think that a lot of ideas germinate in a place. They find locations of where they grow out of, it’s like a very fertile space, which is very horizontal in spatial terms. For example, I am based in London now, I am thinking and I am reading, I am researching on things, and I think… what does geography mean to me as a space? It’s not a space that is just about the built structures, but also about the ecology of that space, and the community living there. And so I do keep going back to my experience, because it’s my experience of something that has made me think that these are the questions I want to stay with and continue to explore. So I would say that it’s ongoing in that sense, that ideas are ongoing.
Zahra Khan, the curator of the Pavilion, was talking about how these lines on the city sculptures in Hundreds of Birds Killed refer to notions of migration. Could you speak to that?
The lines specifically are extracted from the cities that these maps relate to. This is Kolkata [pointing to the actual scultpure], which is now in India, and the lines are railways, the main roads and rivers or waterways. There are no settlements in these maps, because they would have created a very different, denser space, and I wanted to keep this more open. I guess ideas of migration are very much there, when you think about objects displaced by the natural disasters, and you think about the impact of weather on a location. These cities are very small dots on a map that I am talking about, but if you think of the impact of weather and climate change, then definitely the ideas of migration and displacement are very much connected to this work. Because the weather report that you hear talks about that displacement quite clearly, or at least it alludes to it.
You are in London doing postgraduate research at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, and I was wondering how your studies are influencing the way you see your work and how they might inform your future creations…
It’s a great cohort of students and the teaching staff is really really tough, they are really intense and the learning curve is very steep. There is a lot of reading and workshopping of ideas. What I feel is that when we are looking at the theory of certain things or looking at practicing artists through those theories, it’s not just a theoretical programme, but it’s very much engaging with contemporary culture. Not just fine art, but artists, activists, single practitioners… This process of pushing myself through theoretical work makes me really think about what I am doing and why I am doing it. So what’s happening is that I am questioning a lot what I am doing next and what I want to do next. And I think… ok, I need to push it a bit more, do some more research, and when I say ‘research’, I don’t mean just reading books, but also why I am going to talk to somebody on an island, look through a telescope, and what kind of questions do I want to think about, what do I want to engage with, but also what do I want people to understand on why I am choosing this particular place to talk about…
When you see the film Sticky rice, there is a conversation with an urban scholar that I have been speaking to for years, a wonderful interesting man, and then I also have a conversation with a history professor in Cornell, and in the middle of these two conversations you have five minutes of this 13-minute film where these artisans are building boats. That also was a very long conversation. I didn’t want to just include the visual of them making the boats, but it was important for me to inclue their voice within the voices of these other scholars, and not to just have them visually present on screen. To me it is very much about the different pools of knowledge that I have engaged with. So to include their voice and to materialise what they are saying through images and show the value of what they are doing, I wanted to put them on the same level of what the other scholarly people are saying and doing. That’s what I also felt was important.
What is the meaning of the telescope… and the gaze you have through it?
I was very interested in the idea of looking and how the telescope offers a view that pulls in certain kinds of landscapes or views, and how as a viewer we connect to that kind of space. And I was also thinking about the sense of viewing a map, the idea of how through the telescope you are looking on a very horizontal axis, at a very specific point, as opposed to from an aerial point of view, like when you are looking through an infrared or a satellite navigation system, which is more similar to how for example warfare is conducted or how site is organised through all kinds of apparatuses. The telescope at the same time also becomes this kind of apparatus of power used to look into something more closely. And I wanted to bring the object into the space, let people view through it as well.
Could you tell us a little more about the drawings and how they fit in the show?
The drawings actually started from a range of feelings. I had shot a film through a telescope some time back. It was a scene in the ocean, featuring a very rough ocean during the monsoon, and I projected that film in the inner city of Karachi, on a very big wall, and I found this beautiful moment where I felt that I was bringing the ocean into the city. But there was also a sound piece in the film. I was working with a sound collective at the time and told them I wanted the sound piece to be loud enough for the people in the streets to hear it, otherwise it would be lost in the city’s noise. They had a microphone mounted on a rickshaw. The sound was a musical piece by a Dutch composer, and it was moving out into the space of the tiny streets, into a very congested area in narrow spaces, with people, balconies, windows, shops… and what happened was that the sound pushed into all these empty spaces, the shops, the balconies, in intangible ways. People came out to see what was happening, and I felt like I was casting the sound into the city. And so I came up with this question: how do you cast a city… like when you pour liquid metal into a mould? You are using something liquid, which is moving and transforming until it sets into a solid form.
So when the sound was happening, I felt like I was casting into a space, which was something I could never physically do, because the space is so large. And I got really excited because it was a very conceptual and complex question, and I started thinking about how I would bring this question into my work. So those drawings were made a few years ago and the title is Cast of a city, because I was working with watercolour, and using this liquid gum, which stops the watercolour from moving into the paper and holds it in. I was pouring liquid water with pigment, which would be held within the shapes that I had drawn with that resist glue, and when everything would be dry I’d peel off the glue, and you would see the negative spaces, or rather the white of the paper again. It was just a way to question this idea of casting a city. These are literally casts of a city, but I think there is much more to do with this, especially with the idea of sound, because it’s not something that you are going to tangibly hold or see, but it’s something that maybe people might experience, and it could be quite powerful. It’s a bit of an abstract concept, but that’s where these watercolours started.
Could you expand on how this work ties in with Venice as a location and also with how it could be a small microcosm of Pakistan, as Zahra Khan mentioned?
The histories of both these cities – Venice and Karachi – are very different, they both emerged as strategic ports at different moments in time. Venice has been important since the 12th century, Karachi has been important since the late 19th century. In terms of geographical position, I think it is really interesting because they have both been intersections of trade, politics and cultural exchange. And both have a maritime history and trade. What is really wonderful for me is this idea of pre-industrial production of labour and vessels in Venice, for example, producing merchant vessels since the 12th century in the Arsenale. I think that when I was working with this idea of the boats being made by hand in the film, it was interesting because it was like an inversion of the scale of what is happening here, which is obviously colossal, while the boats in the film are miniaturised, but at the same time they carry their own history, and they carry the history of their making, because they are made by local craftsmen in a city that has a colonial history as well. But they also carry the history of their own identity.
The boats that I gave to the artisans in the souvenir boat workshops are cargo containers and historical vessels from the 18th-19th centuries, and also before that. I gave scaled down drawings of the Don Bosco, which was the first ship that came with the Spanish Armada in 1497 with Vasco de Gama. I took out images, I redrew them, rescaled them down, and when I say ‘scale’, I mean I took a 32-metre cargo container, the 21-metre Don Bosco built in 1497 and a 3-metre Indian fishing boat that crossed the Pakistan border and was impouded, and then I scaled them in proportion to each other. I then gave the artisans the linear drawings I had made and said I’d like them to make models out of them. So the boats carry the history of where they are coming from… invasion, colonisation, merchant ships, trade…
What would you say is your contribution to this year’s Venice Biennale as an artist from Pakistan?
I’m very honoured to kick the door open for Pakistan at the Venice Biennale, it’s also a huge burden to carry. There is strength in the art scene and the ability to show it to the international scene is a way to move forward. Politically, economically, culturally there are huge problems in Pakistan, so a chance to get out there for the art scene is huge, as there isn’t so much support in the government. It’s really important to go beyond our isolation and think beyond Pakistan. The narratives that are being exported are also so one-dimensional, we need spaces to have different conversations. Artists need to be more demanding, and through culture you are carrying a responsibility to connect with the world, with the people. People coming to Venice are not just art people, but are also interested in ideas and different voices, and are often bored with what’s happening in the art world and exhausted by what is overexposed. Our art scene is intense and has not been open for long, and this is a very important moment for me and also for Pakistan.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
“Manora Field Notes” by Naiza Khan, the Pakistan Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, is on view from 7 May to 24 November 2019.