Winner of the KB24 Juried Art Prize, Nadeem Al-Karimi expanded cinema for the fourth iteration of the Karachi Biennale, urgently themed Rizq|Risk. Al-Karimi’s burrow-like screening structure sits next to a playground in Bagh Ibn-e-Qasim, with the Bahria Icon Tower looming darkly in the background. The dome is fabricated with polythene bags and trashed wrappers of processed foods brought to the Hunza valley by urban tourists. Next to the screening dome, a public trashcan overflows with litter - only validating the artist’s critique of us cityfolk. On one side of the structure, a fluffy-tailed fox collaged from crisps-wrappers looks down upon us scornfully, and on the other, an excavator bulldozes through craggy rocks. The Last Act (20 min) screens inside the tunnel, opening with a scene of a Himalayan Red Fox family being evicted from their den. This docu-fiction feels mythical and mystical, depicting masked people and glacial entanglements. We are introduced to concepts of male and female glaciers and the lost ancient ritual of glacier-mating. We are granted permission to enter different worlds where indigenous sustainable methods are meticulously preserved. An old Balti man leads us into what seems like a decades old local hydropower generation room. We follow a wrinkled lady making almond flour by hand. There’s a lot going on and it’s hard to keep track of the narrative. A strong glare from the sun prevents me from a clear viewing, but it is apparent that the installation is a disdainful critique of the manner in which the Hunza Valley is being transformed by capital and human-induced climate change. The film is not a warning, it is a rebuke: the damage is done. Inside the screening tunnel, plastic walls trap heat and trash-filled jute sacks line the walls. The discomfort feels apt: everybody wants to jet ski in Attabad Lake, but nobody cares about Baba Jan.
Expanded Cinema is used to describe a film, video, multi-media performance or an immersive environment that pushes the boundaries of cinema and rejects the traditional one-way relationship between the audience and the screen.”
Lina Persson sets up a different kind of screen in the Frere Hall Gardens: a hive box. While Al-Karimi uses cinema as a portal into a distant ecosystem, Persson arranges an animated ecological site for us to experience directly. As viewers, we cannot see the magic happening inside the box (much like a television), but we can see the action on the outer cover as bees buzz across the screen, hovering over the golden-saffron potted marigolds that have mostly dried up by the end of the biennale in an especially hot October, and around the handbuilt clay fractal flower arrangement. This installation is a stark demonstration of how rising temperatures are impacting our lives and our food chains. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), three out of four crops that produce fruits and seeds for human consumption across the globe depend on pollinators. From a hidden speaker, we listen to instructions on how to interact with this expanded cinema installation. Marigold Entanglements is an ecosystem in which Persson confers legal status upon the Apis Dorsata, the South/Southeast Asian honey bee, and appoints her audience as agents to safeguard their rights. The audience is implicated as both participants and protectors, fully tuned into the resonance of this work and the precarity of our interconnectedness. The clay flowers are a result of a workshop conducted by Lina Persson at SABS University Jamshoro where students used red Indus clay to create 19 stunning sculptures which are meant to serve as drinking fountains for the bees. The bees and hive box were brought in by Wajdan Khattak of Green Will Honey, a sustainable beekeeper from Nowshera District KPK. In this way, the making and realization of Marigold Entanglements is through a considered network of actors and actions, conversations and care.
Sadqain Raza’s Water Remembers is beautifully installed in the most incredible space at NED City Campus, with natural sunlight pouring in through an arched skylight. What seem to be five large canvases are lined up against the back wall of the room, submerged in a trough of black liquid. Narrow plexiglass troughs filled with different colored liquids are lined perpendicular on white sandbeds. I have no clue how to read this work. I move closer, and the KB24 site coordinator informs me that the “canvases” are actually slabs of plaster. He explains that the slabs are dipped into the troughs and absorb different pigments at different rates, creating the most wonderful Dionysian abstract landscapes through chromatography. I’d argue that this is beyond painting, it is cinema: time-based and moving-image, the chemical process is a nod to film-processing. Reading the didactic, I learn that the work is an investigation of the effects of Faisalabads textiles mills on the river Ravi, a beautifully rendered example of art practice-as-research.
Sepideh Rahaa’s triptych multichannel film screened at the Alliance Francaise Gallery, Songs to Earth, Songs To Seeds (18 min) is another fantastic example of practice as research. In her case, the research is personal. Rahaa takes us to her ancestral home in Zarrinabad Sofia Village in Northern Iran, where she chronicles and poetically narrates the traditional technique of rice cultivation passed down in her father’s family. She reveals that she has specifically requested her father to follow the traditional cultivation path - an important experiment. The film feels like a call to action, a soothing lullaby of this laborious and time consuming process. “Don’t waste a morsel!” the film beseeches us. Every grain is precious; the farm workers’ loving songs bring it to our plates and bellies. The Mazani songs sung by the women working in the paddies and fields add to the serenity of the score, the film becoming an archive of these Northern Iranian songs as well as centering the labor of women involved in rice cultivation. The three channel visual creates a sense of circularity and interconnectedness: seed to harvest, harvest to seed. Everything everywhere all at once. The images don’t compete with each other. There is time to look at everything. There is abundance if you nourish it with patience and care. At the end, Rahaa hails this indigenous method as a success: her father harvests 1500 kg of rice out of 50 kg worth of grain.
Like Rahaa’s Songs to Earth, Songs To Seeds, Anna Konik’s film preview A Song of Humble Beauty (55 min) explores connections between labor, tradition, and sustainability. This is another example of practice-as-research where the artist has produced an extensive documentation of Sindhi art and cultural object-making. Sheets of hanging Ajrak create a passage guiding us towards the projection wall. Konik has included a selection of Sindhi handcrafted art objects in the installation, priming the audience in a tactile way. The film is a meditative montage of beautifully composed frames showing the processes to make the objects we have just walked past: woodblock carving, block printing, wheel throwing, indigo dyeing, basket weaving, metal working. Konik offers the audience an intimate and immersive observation of master craftspeople in Karachi, Hala, Bhit Shah, District Tando Allahyar, and Mirpukhas. At 55 minutes, it is one of the longest time-based works in KB24. The filmmaker demands a slowing down of her audience, inviting us to take note and be mesmerized by the knowledge, the hands, the labor, the methods, the skills, the effort and exertion that goes into completing these magical objects we encounter daily. The performance of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai’s rhythms furthers the idea of art-making as a spiritual practice. At times, there is drama in the film. Who is the cloaked woman collecting littered plastic bags? 15 minutes later, the mystery is solved. Konik does not shy away from including “ugly” shots, depicting a street overflowing with sewage water and unbothered people nonchalantly going about their activities around it. This image stays in my mind; I can smell it. In fact, tomorrow I will smell it as I go about my own activities, unbothered and accustomed.
“If many of us have, therefore experienced that sudden strange feeling whilst walking in the city that we are walking through the set of a film, this is undeniably a part of the cinema. Cinema can no longer be restricted to the screen upon which films are projected, or to the darkened interior of the movie theatre where we become, directly the spectators of film.”
Waheeda Baloch, curator of KB24, has successfully ensured that cinema flowed out into the city. Expanded cinema is particularly consequential in Karachi as this city becomes increasingly unlivable. These radical installations ask for our time, attention, and participation, urging us to pause in order to reframe our experience of the city and the world, and reimagine our roles as active citizens collectivily responsible for creating solutions for the most urgent issues of our time. In Karachi, I rarely feel like time is mine; I am often so caught up in my own internal monologue that I absolutely need something to snap me out of my preoccupation with myself. Stopping to encounter a film in a park offers that necessary perspective, a different lens, an expanded consciousness. A way to step out of what we are mired in so we can actually perceive what is.
Kulsum Ebrahim is a visual artist and researcher working in animation and film based between Karachi and London. She is interested in cities, health, mobility, and ecology, and believes in the revolutionary potential of animation. She graduated with a BA in International Relations and Art from Pomona College in 2015, and an MA in Animation from the Royal College of Art in 2023.
