Karachi and its localities — especially the island of Manora, with its own rich history of habitation and exclusion — continues to be the force that drives Naiza Khan’s work in her new exhibition titled “Undoing / Ongoing” at the Rossi & Rossi Gallery in London. Perhaps speaking to the almost paradoxical elements of destruction / construction, her works in their poetic, thematic quality almost bring to light the poetry of Shireen Z. Haroun, titled Night at Keamari. The poet evokes the pulse of a quiet view of Karachi shining bright and beckoning, by saying, “Glitter of lights on land / between harbour / and the / unnamed islet / (a ruined temple still abides) / sea smells.”

I am currently reading Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in my Mind and his work is about the growing, consuming city of Istanbul. The hills in the surroundings of Istanbul are taken over by migrants rapidly coming in from Anatolia. One remembers their own memories of the sea of Karachi and the rising developments around it, such as the Dolmen Mall. Such is the nature of Khan’s work — which is related to the many aspects of an ever shifting Karachi that consumes as it grows.

In layers of the city, a classic theme in her work, there is something darker — a shift away from Manora Island into a larger engagement of the waste we create in our ever larger need to consume, in our drive to be developed citizens of a rising nation.

‘Whale under construction’ could very well be a whale washed up on the shores of Karachi, which is not an infrequent occurrence, but always an occasion for curiosity in the news. Directly linked to a direct destruction of the heaving, uncontrollable sea, itself a site of imagination and possibility for the residents by the sea, today it is a site of waste dumping; the work unveils to the viewer in layers. The skeleton of the whale, which forms the central element in the work, could be read as a metaphor for its meat sucked dry to the bones in the same way as we might extract the land from its resources. It could also be read differently and represent a creation of a new whale (or a building) — a monumental, shocking destruction, very much like the Bahria Icon Tower in Karachi over which there were many battles and court cases, and which now rises arrogantly in the city, clouding the historic Shah Ghazi Mazar right next to it.

Naiza Khan’s work is a reflection of our lives and of the geographies that are continuously shifting

Khan’s series of watercolours titled ‘Landfill I, II, III, IV’ also evoke the theme of the waste in our lives; ‘Landfill III’ reveals for a viewer structures rising from within this sewerage that we urbanites banish from our mentality. The irony of structures growing from within represents an almost poetic justice, a sign that we are doomed to live within the very environment we destroy.

Khan’s work is a reflection of our lives as citizens and of the geographies that are continuously shifting. The exhibition can be summed in her small etching ‘The land was once free’, a busy work showcasing an empty piece of land with layers of history etched in, the site of a new construction. Much like the land, we also contemplate on our own entrapments in the spaces we inhabit and occupy.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, November 8th, 2015

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