Zahra Malkani / Syma Tariq, Samandari ehsaasat; a Thousand Channels, listening session

Listening session: Samandari Ehsaasat/Oceanic Feelings #3 For this listening session, artist-researcher Zahra Malkani offers the third in her series of experimental mixes, Samandari Ehsaasat/Oceanic Feelings #3 (33min). It brings together found audio and music, interviews and live field recordings that span languages, dialects and musical/mystical traditions across southern Pakistan. This geography, today marked by state brutality and militarism, environmental devastation and extractivism, is loud in its ‘ecstatic grief’. Sacral states journey alongside the coast’s multiple adversities and raucous belongings. Here, the ocean, the river, the boatman and the boat are all recurrent motifs – as obstacles, as vessels, as companions, as bridges, as guides. The track includes research and sound collected as part of Karachi LaJamia’s course Humare Siyal Rishte. https://www.colomboscope.lk/athousandchannels-episode-three Listening session: Samandari Ehsaasat/Oceanic Feelings #3 For this listening session, artist-researcher Zahra Malkani offers the third in her series of experimental mixes, Samandari Ehsaasat/Oceanic Feelings #3 (33min). It brings together found audio and music, interviews and live field recordings that span languages, dialects and musical/mystical traditions across southern Pakistan. This geography, today marked by state brutality and militarism, environmental devastation and extractivism, is loud in its ‘ecstatic grief’. Sacral states journey alongside the coast’s multiple adversities and raucous belongings. Here, the ocean, the river, the boatman and the boat are all recurrent motifs – as obstacles, as vessels, as companions, as bridges, as guides. The track includes research and sound collected as part of Karachi LaJamia’s course Humare Siyal Rishte. https://www.colomboscope.lk/athousandchannels-episode-three

Zahra Malkani is a multidisciplinary artist based in Karachi. Her research-based art practice spans text, video and web, and explores the politics of development, infrastructure and militarism in Pakistan. She is a co-founder with Shahana Rajani of Karachi LaJamia, an experimental pedagogical project seeking to politicise art education and explore new radical pedagogies and art practices. Zahra is also an Assistant Professor of Practice in Communication and Design at Habib University, Karachi and is currently a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. Syma Tariq is a PhD student at the Creative Research into Sounds Arts Practice centre, University of the Arts London. Her practice-based research focuses on the 1947 partition and its discursive and temporal separations through the unstable practice of listening, incorporating aural histories, testimonial politics, historical erasure and sonic-archival modes of knowledge formation in the postcolonised present. Her wider practice encompasses audio essay, field recording, interviewing, writing, DJing and sound production and curation.