About-Exhausted Geographies

Exhausted Geographies is a collaborative publishing practice by Shahana Rajani, Zahra Malkani and Abeera Kamran, based in Karachi, Pakistan. It is a series of publications exploring image, text and the city. Each volume of Exhausted Geographies mobilises a crucial, cross-disciplinary political imaginary to rethink current representations of Karachi and includes a wide range of topics that provide new insights into the social, spatial and discursive fabric of the city.

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Exhausted Geographies Vol.II

Exhausted Geographies II engages with landscapes at the intersection of infrastructure, war and ecological crisis in Karachi. We map the city through a new road named Jinnah Avenue, through the rusting remnants of railways, in the debris of what was once a mountain, in disappearing bodies of water, and against the ubiquitous borders proliferating across its landscape. These neo-colonial transformations, influenced by transnational networks of power, finance, and capital, are entangled with the military apparatus and take place in spaces of constructed invisibility. We look at the ways in which war and development manifest in these invisible landscapes and are sustained through environmental violence in the name of the nation-state.

Reading the city through emergent and decaying infrastructures, disappearing ecologies, and architectures of militarisation, this collection of texts and images draws on collective research undertaken for the Gadap Sessions – a course organized by Karachi LaJamia in collaboration with the Karachi Indigenous Rights Alliance in 2016. The Gadap Sessions set out to study and document the historical township of Gadap at the outskirts of Karachi in light of contemporary processes of development, displacement and climate change.

This publication has been made possible with the generous support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

A book by Zahra Malkani, Shahana Rajani and Abeera Kamran

Exhausted Gegoraphies Vol.I

Exhausted Geographies Vol.I is a radical engagement with the politics of representation and map-making in order to explore and produce new ways of seeing and imagining cities in the global south. This publication is a collection of 7 maps, each coupled with an essay, contributed by artists, architects, historians, urban planners, geographers and anthropologists working on/in Karachi. It is a coming together of different situated and localized knowledges to enable an exchange of ideas and methodologies beyond the borders of the academy and the art world. Using artistic and interdisciplinary research methods, the contributors subvert mapmaking into an open and critical medium to produce visual representations of space, temporality, politics and human relationships.

Exhausted Geographies mobilises a crucial, cross-disciplinary political imaginary to rethink current representations of Karachi and includes a wide range of topics that provide new insights into the social, spatial and discursive fabric of the city.

Borrowing the terminology of Irit Rogoff, this project takes as its starting point a moment of exhaustion from representations of and discourses around a city whose histories and geographies have collapsed into clichés. Rather than offering representations of the city as a single, fixed, knowable whole, this project is an assemblage of experimentations in ways of seeing, rendering, understanding and inhabiting the innumerable parallel realities of the city of Karachi. The city, too, is read as an assemblage, an open multiplicity of relations, encounters, movements – experienced and viewed in multiple scales, dimensions and perspectives.

EDITED BY

Zahra Malkani and Shahana Rajani

DESIGN BY

Abeera Kamran

CONTRIBUTORS

Nausheen Anwar is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of Social Sciences at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi, Pakistan. She received her PhD from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), Columbia University. She is the author of Infrastructure Redux: Crisis, Progress in Industrial Pakistan & Beyond (2015, Palgrave Macmillan), which explores, through detailed cases of Sialkot and Faisalabad in industrializing Punjab, the double-edged narratives of development that frame infrastructure in post-independence Pakistan. Nausheen is the recipient of several grants that center on themes such as gender and inequality, conflict resolution and urban governance, migration, and political-economy of infrastructure development.
Yaminay N.Chaudhri works with the emotional and physical architectures of longing, drawing on the precarious nature of place, home and cities. She uses multiple media including video, performance and text to recreate situations that are both intensely emotional and unexceptionally banal. Chaudhri has a degree in architecture from Cornell University, and an MFA in combined media studio arts from State University of New York at Albany. She has taught at Karachi University, Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, SZABIST, Karachi, the Aga Khan University, Karachi, and is the founder of the Tentative Collective.
Zahra Malkani is a Karachi-based artist. Her work engages with visual articulations of protest and the circulation, proliferation, and archiving of images in cyberspace as evidence and resistance in the Baloch and Sindhi nationalist movements. She is a member of the Tentative Collective and teaches visual culture at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Malkani received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Bard College, NY and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths University of London, UK.
Shahana Rajani is an artist and curator based in Karachi. Her research-based practice is invested in creating counter-geographies and alternate discourses on cities in the global south. She has worked extensively on community-based projects exploring urban space, violence, displacement and migration. She also conducts radical tours of Karachi to recall forgotten histories of resistance, using performance and storytelling to stake a claim in spatial politics and urban narratives. She is a member of Tentative Collective and teaches at Karachi University, Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and SZABIST University. She holds a BA in History of Art from University of Cambridge and an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia.
Anam Soomro is a lawyer based in Karachi, Pakistan.
Shayan Rajani is a PhD candidate in History at Tufts University. His research is on eighteenth and nineteenth century narrative traditions of geography in Sindh and South Asia. He is wildly curious about how people in Sindh imagined the world and their region at a time when British geographic and colonial constructs of continents and ethnolinguistic regions did not frame their spatial thinking. He is currently poring over manuscripts in archives in search of answers. When he is not at the library or in the archives, he is inevitably found having chai with family and friends.
Fazal Rizvi graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2010. With an interdisciplinary practice encompassing painting, photography, installation, video and text, Rizvi explores notions around loss, migration, post-colonial identity and more. He has exhibited in Japan (Moriya), Paris, Moscow, Maastricht, London, Dundee as well as in Pakistan. He was selected for the Arcus Project Residency, Japan, in 2011 and was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust and British Council Residency at Gasworks, London, 2014, and was in the Vasl International Artist Residency 2015 as the Art Writer in Residence.
Sarwat Viqar is a PhD Candidate in the Special Individualized Programs at Concordia University. Situated in an interdisciplinary framework which draws upon anthropology, history and community studies, her research engages with constructions of community, identity and urban space in the metropolis of Karachi. Previously Sarwat worked as an architect and urban consultant on projects in various regions of Pakistan, Montreal, Bangkok and in the Pacific coastal region of Mexico.