UNEARTHING STORIES FROM THE CORE

Acts of Disappearance

2023

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

Site-specific installations, Hunza

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.

Site-specific installations, Attabad Lake, Hunza

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.

Concept development, research, documentation, studies, photo documentation, & pilot projects. Project proposals for 2024.

Resting at the intersection of personal narrative, contested land, and eco-therapy, Unearthing Stories… looks at land(scape) as a repository concealing and preserving our history. This project expands my work on the effects of racialized land displacement in Oklahoma (The American Dream, 2021, Stories From The Core, 2022). It theoretically links what is often positioned as a rural social ill in the United States to the international arena. It is physical, cultural, ethnographic, historical, vernacular. The unexpected alignment between the rural US and Pakistan reveals two fiercely contested territories, both characterized by geographic majesty and the immense trauma absorbed by contested land and its inhabitants. Its forthcoming phase looks to the endangered Tallgrass Prairie in north-eastern Oklahoma. As with the current struggles for sovereignty and environmental justice within the US, the peoples of Gilgit-Baltistan struggle for recognition from Pakistan’s national assembly. With an understanding that the land carries multiple burdens, Unearthing Stories… acknowledges histories of indigenous habitancy, colonial settlement and violence, and current ecological devastation.

Site-specific installations, Attabad Lake, Hunza

Project Partners & Contributors:

Project Facilitator in Gilgit-Baltistan
Zaheera Siraj, Compliants Officer, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Gilgit-Baltistan

Project Facilitators
Salima Hashmi, Professor Emeritus, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore
Mirza Hussain, Project Coordinator Eco-friendly Bags Project, KADO
Aqeela Bano, CEO, Ciqam Green Solutions Pvt, Ltd.
Tasawar Baig, PhD, Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences
Karakoram International University, Gilgit-Baltistan

Poetry by Kaveh Bassiri (forthcoming)

Meditation Prompts by Sarah & Maryam Ahmad

Land Acknowledgment: (forthcoming)

Attabad Lake, Nagar valley, Hunza
Image from Google Earth

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

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