Acts of Disappearance

2023

Digital photo prints of site-specific installations of Hunza caps in Attabad Lake, Gilgit-Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, 36” x 24” each.

The work is an offering. Honoring natural landscapes as sites of refuge, healing, and renewal. A reckoning with landscapes of displacement and erasure. And a song of survival, rising, and becoming. Of transcendence.

Gilgit-Baltistan, home to highest mountains and longest glaciers outside polar regions, is Pakistan’s most ethnically diverse region. Disproportionately shouldering ravages of climate change, 2010’s massive landslide buried Attabad villages, formed a desert of sand dunes and the Attabad Lake. Displaced Attabad people were forgotten, here evoked by traditional Hunza caps.

The territory is also suffering some of the greatest global damage from climate change. Over the past three years I have engaged the intertwined themes of eco-therapeutic art and contested land(scape). With an understanding that the land carries multiple burdens, my work acknowledges histories of indigenous habitancy, colonial settlement, and current ecological devastation. I explore themes of displacement and renewal, communal healing, and above all: the sublime, restorative potential of nature. My installations draw on transnational artistic roots to offer regenerative spaces, transcending boundaries of culture and place.

Crucially, my work positions engagement with the natural world as integral to wellness. The question of “Disappearance” is multivalent: the disappearing ecological system in the face of climate disaster, disappearances of activists who protest for social justice. Disappearance of indigenous bodies, and of labor - especially within the most economically impoverished regions, globally. Disappearance of green space from urban centers. Acts of Disappearance implicitly asks: who has access to land resources? The earth offers itself to us for healing and sustenance; how do we honor its legacy and honor those who have historically been caretakers of the land? What reciprocal relationships can we foster with the land? Ultimately what can we learn by sitting with and listening to global hinterland? What do people residing closest to contested land have to share? How do the “we” who are non-Natives form connection with the land outside extractive relationships? Acts of Disappearance seeks to be an offering.

Installations in Gilgit-Baltistan & digital photography:

Unearthing Stories From The Core

Acts of Disappearances (site-specific installations 1)

Acts of Disappearances (site-specific installations 2)

Site-specific installations in Hunza, GB
where the eagles nested
and rocks eroded
where parts of our selves
erased and disappeared
out of our reach
leaving fragments behind
scattered inside, buried deep
yearning to be whole again
for the earth to heal us
and root us or lift us again

Site-specific installations by Attabad Lake, Hunza, GB
when the mountain fell, and the river stopped
its water rose, villages submerged
a cold desert of sand dunes formed
in the devastation a lake was born
resorts and tourists populated
the people of the mountain
forgotten and displaced, the Attabad IDPs
a colony of internally displaced people
far away from their home the land that sustained
and nourished them, now a tourist resort

Project Proposal:

Both Gilgit Baltistan and Oklahoma have resplendent landforms and historical parallels contribute to current struggle for political sovereignty. Oklahoma, now home to 39 federally recognized tribes, has been alternately dismissed and abused by America’s government. Once known as "Indian Territory,” it was the final destination of the devastating nineteenth-century Trail of Tears. Subsequent land grabs, violence against Black communities, and environmental destruction contribute to Oklahomans’ deeply fraught relationship with the land. Yet while frequently a site of conflict and contestation, Oklahoma’s earth is geographically extraordinary. The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma is the largest protected piece of its kind left in the world. Only 4% remains.

Gilgit-Baltistan is the most ethnically and culturally diverse region in Pakistan. The ravages of climate change are contributing to a mental health crisis among indigenous and displaced populations. In 2010, in a massive landslide buried Attabad village; a cold desert of sand dunes formed the Attabad Lake. Now populated by resorts and the area’s biggest tourist attraction, the displaced people of Attabad were forgotten. As with the current struggles for tribal sovereignty within the US, the peoples of Gilgit-Baltistan campaign for recognition from Pakistan’s national assembly. While under the administration of Pakistan, the region hasn’t been given statehood status nor representation in Parliament.

By conceptually linking displaced populations in Pakistan and the US, Acts of Disappearance establishes a space for amplifying voices. It insists on a visceral understanding of ‘local’ environmental catastrophe as part of lager patterns, putting them into dialog as a call for policy change.

Seeking deeper connections with our land(scapes) as a force of healing, of spiritual energies, as repositories of our histories, we offer our gratitude to the land and its custodians as we unfold our own futures.

This project is made possible with funding support from The Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and Creative Projects Grant funding from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition.