Sailab at AAN Art Space and Museum!

The show has been curated by Amra Ali! Wondeful installation by Nama Khalid at the museum! “This monsoon, diverse narratives have organically gelled, though through very different routes, concerns and contexts. Poignant vignettes of loss, displacement, retrieval and transformation provide multiple layers of viewing and meaning. There is an underlying urgency in coming to terms with floods today. There is a focus on rural and remote areas of coastal Sind, as well as in urban centres such as Karachi. The curatorial intention has been to draw into the work of practitioners whose response to water patterns has been ongoing, moving away from commissioned art, into spaces that engage you to reflect and in which you may incidentally find yourself. These are shared narratives of memories of places and people lost, where we arrive often after a traumatic shift within our surroundings: land, homes and belongings lost or submerged, also providing a critique of polarities within lifestyles and social realities.

There is a predominant archival presence, and simultaneous opening of trajectories/arteries which the viewer can experience, and navigate through. Ideas that allow you to drift into spaces of beauty and stillness amid the obvious references to inundation and torrent. Disruption is part of the process, whether it is in the depiction of a space or in the installation of the works, evoking the ongoing process of land reclamation, and water reclaiming the land. This imbalance seems integral to the curatorial reading. There has been no desire to conceal, but rather to enjoy, akin to an unedited conversation, an unfinished painting; to find comfort in the subtle nuances and shifts from one body of work to another. The spaces in between and the viewer in it become integral to the reading”.

Amra Ali
28th August 2025, AAN Art Space & Museum

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