Near the boundaries of Pakistan’s Sindh and Balochistan provinces lies one of the world’s warmest cities: Jacobabad, where locals endure temperatures as high as 127 degrees Fahrenheit and a severe shortage of water due to improper public water resource management. An inadequate barrage system and an excess of rain is a deadly combination; the city was inundated in 2010 in what was dubbed the “super-floods,” resulting in the displacement of thousands of people (well over a million across the country) and loss of life, property, and livestock.
Across a range of mediums, many Pakistani artists address urgent environmental concerns for human and non-human agents relying on symbiotic connections for survival in the local ecosystem. In recent years, they have begun to invoke nostalgia, probe policymakers, and take aim at public perception to shift our current attitudes toward natural resources and waste management.
Hamid Ali Hanbhi, who was born in Jacobabad, underlines long-standing environmental decay through drawings and paintings of Martianesque dry lands and floods impressed upon monochromatic canvases. “The locals sorely miss looking at clean water bodies,” he told Hyperallergic. “If there are none to ‘think about’ or ‘look at,’ I will document existing water bodies in Pakistan and fuse them with Jacobabad’s existing dry lands in my work,” as seen in the Dil Darya series (“heart river” in Urdu). In “Khamosh Manzar 7” (“silent scene” in Urdu) (2021), the artist exposes dejected landscapes through blurred and gray aerial perspectives of land, architectural property, and trees submerged in flood waters.
Hanbhi is now based in Lahore, a city with rich local cultures where expanding industries polarize public opinion over the city’s push for industrialization. Alluding to the persistent toxic smog in the city’s atmosphere, the artist often draws with surma, a special kohl powder traditionally used for improving eyesight and enhancing beauty in South Asia. Working with Surma sticks is messy and requires prudent hand strokes. The medium and its painstaking use conceptually tie in with Hanbhi’s dimmed images that propel us to ask: Just how many industries are enough to evidence growth and at what cost to a city’s population, now at a high risk of developing debilitating health issues?
Documentary works by the all-female Pak Khawateen Painting Club (PKPC), meaning “Good Pakistani Women’s Painting Club” in Urdu, similarly consider the effects of human activities, for better or worse, on natural resources and Indigenous settlements. Formed in Lahore in 2020, PKPC’s name is a satirical play on stereotypical social expectations of a “good woman artist,” whatever that may be. The artists venture into the areas housing “ambitious and patriotic man-made” megastructures built around bodies of water in the country. Through their documentative drawings, videos, sound recordings, paintings, and photographs, they investigate the saccharine, nationalistic rhetoric of modern engineering innovations promising economic productivity for civilians.
In their first and second projects, titled “Indus Water Machines” and “The Tide Country” respectively, PKPC members documented dams and barrages in the country; the establishment of these structures has often been embroiled in shifty national politics. The at-risk in situ ancient rock petroglyphs, native populations, villages, water and land, and architectural structures surrounding these mega projects serve as active protagonists in PKPC’s images, foregrounding displacement of communities around these rapidly transforming sites that have historically enabled cross-cultural exchanges and refuge.
The Club also traveled to glaciers in the north of Pakistan in a collaborative expedition with Lumens Studio UK for the project “Glacial Movements and the Ghaib (Unseen),” exhibited this year at VM Art Gallery in Karachi. The works of PKPC members Saba Khan, Amna Hashmi, Zohreen Murtaza, and Saulat Ajmal document the effects of increased tourism in the north of Pakistan, coupled with the climate crisis, which has already displaced communities in addition to significantly expanding the risk of damage to natural rock formations and receding glaciers.
“We must consider how our thinking can unfold an in-depth understanding of these transformative landscapes, especially through local folklore and superstitions that have permeated these settlements for hundreds of years,” Murtaza said in an interview. “There are no written records — one demystifies these ideas through developing a trusting engagement with the locals and existing oral traditions.”
The jetsam of the sea becomes another man’s art as Karachi-based Sohail Zuberi regularly visits the shore of Sahil Beach, a narrow strip that meets the roughly 17-mile-long Karachi coastline. On his strolls on the beach every weekend with his dog for the last 13 years, Zuberi has chanced upon hundreds of items abandoned along the shore of the Arabian Sea, riddled with metal, plastic, chemical, and textile pollutants from over a hundred industries disseminated within and near Karachi.
These include discarded or broken parts of fishing boats, wooden brushes, sisal and hemp ropes, commercially produced plastics and children’s toys, blood bags, paper waste, and the bones of dead animals and fish. The objects are hauled from the beach to his home studio, which functions as a transitional space between the ocean and the exhibition, sometimes with the help of artisans or laborers. “Traces” (2020), a massive and weighty piece of Burma teak wood used for boat making, was discovered by the artist on the Sahil shore and had to be severed in half for smoother transportation and handling. “I need a temporary warehouse now,” he observed in an interview with Hyperallergic. “My home is overflowing with these.”
In his studio, Zuberi proceeds to classify, clean, and assemble various pieces that he plans to consolidate as displayable artworks. He often collates the detritus in installations like “Look What the Tide Brought In” and the series Seascapes (2022). “This beach is a mirror of the city, at large,” he said. “The pollution crisis is hitting us on the face now. I view myself as a conduit between the sea, these objects, and public awareness.”
Often commercially produced, carelessly utilized, dumped on the land and in the sea, and now spewed out onto the shores of the Arabian Sea, the objects in Zuberi’s atypical archival collection are a testament to the side effects of human ambitions of progress. As ruminative artworks, they provoke queries pertaining to functionality and our relationship with discarded objects, linking environmental ruin and the loss of fishing communities’ traditional knowledge. For instance, the Burma teak included in “Traces” is uniquely suited to boat-making, but Zuberi remarked that it is now rarely used in Pakistan due to its high cost. Here, the work raises questions for the viewer and the scholar: Who are the artisans manufacturing these items? Where did these boat-making practices originate? How can this precious knowledge be documented, preserved, and perhaps open to innovation?
Pakistan has experienced multiple natural disasters over the last decade. In the nation’s subconsciousness, there now lurk not only memories of urban and rural spaces prior to these calamities, but also a constant foreboding that anticipates heatwaves, floods, and crises that displace entire communities. As artists urge us to examine social and bureaucratic dynamics molding humans’ current relationship to the environment, their works provoke difficult questions whose solutions require active policies safeguarding local ecospheres at a transnational level.
