This group exhibition unfolds as a meditation on water’s power to shape memory, displace lives, and leave behind fragile traces of strength. The
This group exhibition unfolds as a meditation on water’s power to shape memory, displace lives, and leave behind fragile traces of strength.
The exhibition Sailaab, curated by Amra Ali at AAN Art Space and Museum, was scheduled to open on 21 August 2025, but, in a fittingly poetic twist, Karachi was struck by a fresh spell of monsoon rains that week. The downpour delayed the opening to the 28th, folding the city’s unpredictable climate into the very story the show sought to tell. Featuring mid-career and established artists, Arif Mahmood, Malika Abbas, Namra Khalid, Rasheed Araeen, Saad Aslam Ali, and Sohail Zuberi, the exhibition explored water’s fraught relationship with memory, displacement, and resilience.
Amra Ali’s curatorial essay sets the tone for an exhibition steeped in water’s mercurial presence. The show grows out of the urgency of floods, particularly in Sindh’s rural belts and Karachi’s urban sprawl, but resists becoming a documentary of catastrophe. Instead, it moves through vignettes of loss, displacement, and retrieval, opening room for viewers to inhabit the in-between: the suspended moment after water recedes.
Arif Mahmood’s Sindh Floods, 2010 anchors the exhibition with a quiet gravity, with images that were shot during the devastating floods of that year; the photographs are tender and unsparing. Their tonal delicacy, soft shadows, and trembling light mirror the precariousness of the lives pictured and of analogue photography itself, whose paper and chemicals are as vulnerable to decay as the histories they record. Mahmood approaches the flooded plains with the eye of a documentarian and the tenderness of a storyteller. His compositions, a boat slicing through mirrored fields, children balanced on improvised rafts, a woman standing in the stillness of her ruined courtyard, carry an almost painterly restraint. Shadows hover delicately across the frames; light pools on waterlogged ground as if trying to reclaim what was taken. There is no sensationalism here. Mahmood resists the impulse to monumentalize suffering, instead finding in each image a quiet witness to endurance. Seen fifteen years on, the series is an archive of both environmental catastrophe and the precariousness of memory-making itself.
If Mahmood offers a public chronicle, Saad Aslam Ali brings the flood indoors. One of the most resonant works is Aslam Ali’s We Were Here (Recovered Photographs, 2020). A sprawling collection of small frames stretches across a white wall, each holding an image salvaged from a flooded basement during the catastrophic rain. Time, water, and sediment have collaborated on these photographs, eroding their clarity, softening edges, and staining paper with strange violets and ochres. Faces blur into abstraction; architectural lines bleed into watery ghosts. Arranged almost like pieces of a family atlas, the series oscillates between archive and ruin. Its strength lies in the tension between what is gone and what survives, the stubborn persistence of texture, gesture, and light, even as identities dissolve. The wall then becomes a tender monument to impermanence, reminding us that memory, too, is malleable: it shifts, leaks, and sometimes remakes itself through damage. Placed in dialogue with the curatorial essay’s call for “unfinishedness” and “unedited conversation,” We Were Here offers an embodied answer. The photographs reject restoration in favour of transformation; they speak of grief, but also of resilience, the way images insist on existing, even as they mutate beyond recognition.
Sohail Zuberi’s Silent Apertures turns to the intimacy of disaster. Nine backlit images, held in PVC piping and anchored by heavy sinkers. They arise from the artist’s experience during Karachi’s torrential rains of July 2022, when water filled his home and left him stranded for days without power. They speak to how floods don’t only upend infrastructures but also etch themselves into the body.
Threading through the show is Rasheed Araeen’s long-standing dialogue with water. His Chakras or disks, first set afloat at London’s St Katherine’s Docks (1969–70) and later at Paris’s Seine and Karachi’s Jheel Park, appear here through archival photographs and texts from Art Beyond Art: Eco-Aesthetics. Painted circles released to the current, they proposed form as movement, art as a social tide. That the Karachi lake of Araeen’s youth, once a wetland alive with fish and mangroves, has since been swallowed by development sharpens the urgency of the work. His gestures now read as both elegy and warning, linking local erosion to global indifference.
Karachi Cartography’s Nowhere to Flow (2025) by Namra Khalid (with Aamnah Tariq and Muhammad Iqbal) turns research into a mural. A vast watercolor map unfurls across the gallery wall, reconstructing Karachi’s pre-colonial coastline, seasonal rivers, lakes, and more than six hundred sub-nalas, most now blocked or erased. The work grew from a crowdsourced Instagram project, augmented by archival maps traced worldwide with support from a Swarovski Foundation × UN grant. It is at once scholarly and elegiac, showing how the city’s present inundations stem from the forgetting, and filling in and of its waterscape.
In Where it once flowed, Malika Abbas offers a subtle, diaristic meditation on loss, memory, and the invisible aftermath of water’s passage. The installation, comprising small, unframed photographs placed across two narrow wooden shelves, accompanied by fragments of text directly on the wall, is unassuming at first glance. Yet its restraint is precisely what gives it power. This is not work that demands attention; it invites quiet observation, asking viewers to lean in, to listen, to stay with what remains. Each photograph feels like a salvaged moment, a visual afterimage of a place, a person, or an emotion already half-lost to time. Faces and landscapes blur softly into shadow; some images are crisp, others veiled in darkness or decay.
What distinguishes the exhibition is its attentiveness to pacing and stillness. The gallery is arranged like a river delta, allowing viewers to drift between eddies of memory and moments of raw disruption. The absence of excessive didactics let the works breathe, encouraging a slower, more intimate encounter, one that mirrors the gradual work of reclaiming ground after loss.
A sharper articulation of the socio-environmental stakes could have amplified the poignancy of these gestures. Yet the choice to foreground affect rather than spectacle feels deliberate, positioning the show as a space for mourning and quiet repair rather than an alarmist pronouncement. While the exhibition thrives in its openness, there are moments when its understatedness risks muting the political urgency of environmental collapse.
What emerges is not a linear narrative but a constellation of responses to inundation. The participating artists eschew grand statements, instead choosing to dwell on missing pieces. These gestures carry a tenderness that mirrors the curatorial approach Ali describes as “akin to an unedited conversation.” There is pleasure in unfinishedness, in works that invite return and rereading. Archival traces weave through the exhibition, documents, maps, and photographs, yet they refuse to solidify into fixed histories. Rather, they become porous, absorbing personal and collective grief while hinting at reclamation. The gallery itself functions as a topography of pauses and crossings. Viewers drift between stillness and torrent, echoing the text’s call to “move away from commissioned art, into spaces that engage you to reflect.” Elsewhere in the show, archival traces, maps, and material interventions echo the same preoccupation with water’s imprint on land and belonging. Collectively, the works chart a subtle politics: a critique of infrastructural neglect and social vulnerability, threaded through personal narratives rather than polemic.