Shahana Rajani
© Shahana Rajani
Using modes of research that happen through collaboration and community engagement, Shahana Rajani is an artist whose practice engages with the visualities and the cultural and ecological impact of infrastructure projects. Four Acts of Recovery is a video installation that follows a family of fisherfolk displaced from their ancestral home of Mul Creek in the fabled Indus Delta, following unprecedented environmental collapse caused by dams and large water infrastructures. Now living in Karachi — one of the world’s megacities — they turn to practices of drawing and mural painting to maintain a sacred relation with their shrines and disappearing homelands. The wetlands of the Indus delta are formed and sustained by the meeting of the river and sea. A dense network of water shrines and saints are known to oversee this sacred union. The engineering and fixing of waterscapes which began in late 19th century colonial India have let to catastrophic environmental imbalance. As imperial regimes governing water desecrated and distributed the Indus River into endless dams, barrages and canals, the river no longer reaches the delta, resulting in its drastic erosion and submersion by the sea. Seventy percent of the delta’s inhabitants, over a million people, have been forced to leave as their ancestral lands disappear. Despite the vast scale of devastation, dams continue to be promoted by the Pakistani state and military as symbols of nation-building and progress. Unlike the colonial approach of drawing maps to fix and control, the community practice of painting landscapes is a sacred ritual for seeking reconnection. It draws on the ancient tradition of drawing talismans in Islamic culture, offering protection and breathing life into a world under threat. The work can be seen as a meeting point of three visual cultures. Firstly, to the violent visual technologies of capitalism that erase the landscape of its traditional cultures and ecology. Secondly, sacred traditions old and new within mystical Islam that become acts of resistance. And lastly contemporary art, in which Four Acts of Recovery highlights the new visuality amidst the violence, and the beauty amongst great difficulty.
Four Acts of Recovery, 2025
2 single-channel videos, 17:40 min.
Series of small shrine and sea paintings, booklets
Courtesy the artist. Collection M HKA
Supported by the Han Nefkens Foundation in collaboration with Prameya Art Foundation (PRAF), Delhi, India; Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA); Nottingham
Contemporary, UK; Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, UAE; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), Japan; and Para Site, Hong Kong.