Zinnia Naqvi & Shahana Rajani: Island of Strangers

In British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s White Paper strategy on immigration, he warned that without stronger integration “we risk becoming an island of strangers.” Working with found photography and personal memory, Naqvi traces her own experiences with migration, and her relationship, from a very young age, to belonging, and its reduction to a measure of utility: questioning which bodies are valued, which are excluded.            

            The Arabic word for universe, alam, and the word for knowledge, ilm, share their origin in the word alamah, a mark. In this exhibition, Rajani explores practices and lineages of drawing and mark-making through which coastal communities in Pakistan remain connected to sacred ecologies of rivers and sea amidst the violence and erasure of infrastructure. Rajani intertwines old and new practices of drawing talismans and making river maps as echoing rituals that protect, invoke and keep alive endangered worlds.