Art Taaalkssss: Zahra Malkani

During her recent residency at La Becque, artist Zahra Malkani has been giving shape to her long-term sonic research project, Samandari Ehsaasat, with the aim of steering it in a new direction. After spending years gathering and expanding a sonic archive that documents the intersection of poetics, protest, and prayer—and the convergence of sound, mysticism, and resistance in landscapes at the frontlines of the climate crisis across the deeply militarized aquatic regions of southern Pakistan—Malkani has built a rich body of material. She is now interested in exploring the exhibition and spatial possibilities of this archive. During this Art Taaalkssss, she will share the ways in which she has been revisiting these sounds and deepen her engagement with craft, materiality, form, and spatiality.

Zahra Malkani is a multidisciplinary artist from Karachi, Pakistan. Collaboration, research, and pedagogy are at the heart of her practice. She is interested in sounding and storytelling dissent and devotion against militarism and infrastructural violence in the watery places that she loves. Working across multiple media, she explores the politics of development and dispossession through the lens of dissident ecological knowledges and traditions of environmental resistance. She is the co-founder, with Shahana Rajani, of Karachi LaJamia. This platform develops experimental and ecstatic ecopedagogies in collaboration with ongoing movements defending land and water in the city.

zahramalkani.com