Pakistan

Manora Field Notes. For its first participation at the Biennale Arte, Pakistan presents a solo project by the multidisciplinary artist Naiza Khan. Her decades-long research into Karachi’s dense urban space and the adjacent Manora Island forms the basis of her presentation. These spaces have histories of built form, memory, and lived experience that stretch back to pre-colonial and colonial times, but they have also experienced considerable rupture from the 19th century to the present. Khan sensitively attends to the way space is inhabited through materiality and embodiment, as well as to the interplay of bodies, the environment, and the social and political forces. Her work has great relevance to other sites in the Global South that are undergoing similar transformations.