Naiza Khan

Manora Field Notes, 2019
Multi-media installation

Manora Field Notes is an iteration of the artist’s long-standing engagement with Manora Island, a peninsula off the coast of Karachi. Khan’s sustained response to the island’s landscape has produced a complex alternative geography, in which the technology of optics – tunnel, aerial view or telescopic – becomes an important part of the multi-sensory mapping of land. She has witnessed the slow erasure of the island’s architectural history and natural ecology. The field notes re-imagine the relationship of craft and technology; of lived histories and ritual to unmask the processes of the global south supply chain. Khan’s visual practice is built on a process of critical research, documentation and mapping-based exploration; focusing on urban public space and its entanglement with colonial history and the excesses of capital. Her multidisciplinary work draws on an extensive archive of photographs, drawings, recorded observations and video work. She engages with multiple bodies of knowledge – historic myths, urban theory and local communities, to foreground the dimensions of embodiment, ecology and habitation. Like the island that stands as a sentry-post, Manora Field Notes is an observation point to see the effects of the uneven geography in the global south, through technologies of vision.