Manora Island only a 20-minute jetty ride away from Karachi shares none of the bustle and verve of the parent port city. Unnoticed, it quietly slid into decline while still home to a functional naval base and an army cantonment since independence. Its impoverished local population comprising of traditional boat building communities and fishing villages suffered considerable setbacks due to over exploitation of fishing resources and is now fragmented.

According to the 1998 census, its population of 9,987 residents has dropped to less than half. The islands attractions, a primitive jetty, the pyramid shaped Varun Dev Mandir Temple, the Manora Lighthouse and St Paul's Church have also succumbed to the ravages of time.

Still listed as a picnic spot, it is home to precious (albeit depleting) mangrove forests, rare species of marine life and bird sanctuaries but Manora's passage from a strategic historical peninsula to a commercial beachfront tourist project has put an end to any vestiges of quaint romance still associated with the outpost. Seemingly 'The Manora project' adds another dimension to Khan's repertoire of gender and body centric investigations. Her oeuvre, peppered with provocative feminine symbols like lingerie, chastity belts, metal body armour, figurative henna applications, latex sheaths, girdles, stays, straps, hoops and cords, has always emphasised body constriction and containment as a suppressive measure. Lobbying for Manora shifts her vocabulary to site plans, historical edifices, graveyards, ruins and imaginary reconstructions. But this swing is just another manifestation of the artist's apprehensions about human freedom constraints.

In her 'Exhale' (2004) series agitated women exhorted for 'individual space,' a personal territory where the self can ventilate. She again played with space and social (in)tolerance by plastering henna templates of female figurations on street walls only to see them disfigured or deleted. She asserted her right to self-defence in 'Heavenly ornaments' (2007) using metallic vestments, inspired by the bullet- proof vest, to voice the complexities of conflict.

It is this same need to reclaim and protect the psychological and physical presence of private space that has prompted the need to salvage the natural tranquillity of Manora.

This vantage point was the landing post of Arab armies during the conquest of Debal and the Dev Mandir itself is centuries old. The island was the site of a small fort constructed in the 18th century when Karachi traded with Oman and Bahrain. In the19th century the British Indian Army established Manora which was taken over by the Pakistan Army in 1947. Though few traces of earlier history remain, the site continued to boast the serenity of a humble resort and offered visitors a welcome respite from the bustle of Karachi. As the modest infrastructure of the retreat crumbles, MoU's are now being signed with foreign investors to build high-rise tourist hotels here.

Over a period of 18 months, Khan has negotiated her personal musings on Manora through a vast repertoire of video, drawings, watercolours, prints, site-specific interventions and interviews of residents. Her aesthetics centralise on creating a jugglery of vanishing acts. Works like 'Ghost blocks', 'Graveyard series', 'Collapse' etc., capture the island's transition in nebulous detail. Linear constructions splashed with aqua pigments or muddied with faint earthy chromatics come across as precarious and ephemeral.

In 'Graveyard', a series of tombs, with ziggurat like tiered bases and headstones, are preceded by fresh unmarked graves circled with just stones. Anonymous they lie in an abandoned cemetery under the chilling spectre of a high-rise looming in the distance.

'Shell homes' an evocative façade whose filigreed tracery, exactingly rendered in a mixture of ink drawing and watercolour, wavers like an apparition.

'Floating blocks' also rise like smoky phantoms but it is the cumulative chaos of 'Collapse' that best speaks of the annihilation of Manora where demolition, eviction and displacement has disrupted the sense of continuity that gave life to the haven.

Fragile, transient and vaporous, the Manora portfolio, is as much a subjective narrative as it is an external reality. Evolving out of an individual concern it is also a grave public issue that draws attention to the politics of conservation and (dis)regard for the human condition.