Running dry: A modernist project - A conversation with Saba Khan

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of The Critical Practices Program in fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series, I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

This afternoon, I am very happy to welcome Saba Khan, a visual artist from Lahore, Pakistan. Through her work that includes painting, sculpture, photography and installation, Saba balances grandeur, artifice and satire in order to address environmental as well as sociological issues related to her country's complex colonial past. Between 2014 and 2020, she was running the Murree Museum Artist Residency, an artist led initiative in a British Colonial Hill town, and in 2019, she founded the satirical artist collective Pak Khawateen Painting Club. In this conversation, we draw from her individual, as well as her collective practice, to discuss about her research into the notion of Third World modernism.

Saba, welcome to Pali-Room!

Thank you Myrto for inviting me.

Thank you for accepting my invitation. I would like to start our conversation today by discussing a little bit about your practice. Throughout the years, you have developed a multimedia practice that looks into class divides, issues of representation and marginalization, as well as issues related to ecological disasters and the consecutive displacement of indigenous populations in your native Pakistan. How did you start engaging with these questions in your practice?

In Pakistan you would see a lot of class discrepancies and I was trying to see how that happens. My previous work is all about class systems, although we don't have like a caste system, but we have an informal one. I realized that it all goes back to resources. A lot of the resources or the wealth of the country goes back into urban centers and not into the hinterland or the smaller towns you would say.

In 2014, I started this artist space in Murree. Murree is a small hill town. It's three kilometers long and was made by the British as a summer capital, but they soon realized that there was no water and moved it somewhere else. But they kept it as like this space for fun and frolic. You would go there just to have fun, but it was an extremely segregated town. So the idea of calling artists there was to see how ecologically it had been affected, because after Pakistan and India got divided —which is called the partition— that town was kind of like free for all. Anybody could build there or do whatever they liked. Now it's like a concrete jungle. You don't see the forest as much. So I started inviting artists, and because the art world is divided into two cities, which is Karachi and Lahore, we don't really get to see each other that much. And because the distance is so wide and you have to take a plane to Karachi or drive for 10 or 15 hours. So the idea was to meet people of your own age group. I also felt like we were being isolated. My generation of artists didn't have the opportunities that people before my generation had and (my aim) was to create this kind of community space.

There's also an extreme water shortage there. Sometimes, you can't shower for a week. You just have enough water to wash dishes. So I was trying to figure out where is this water issue coming from and really trying to go deep into where this crisis lies. So we would go to the government official and ask them: "Why don't I have water? What's going on?" And he would always mention a dam. "This dam is now complete. Now you'll get water." And that actually happened. So there was a dam that was built by the Chinese and the next season there was a lot of water, but still not enough. So that's how I thought, what if we investigated what was going on on these dam sites? There was a lot of Chinese money and influence coming in and the Pakistani government was also bringing up these propaganda campaigns to build several dams. So I started thinking where are these dams and what are they talking about? They wanted people to crowdfund dams and put in money. People's salaries were getting cut to build these dams, but nobody knew where they were. So I thought, what if I asked other women artists whom I have been working with and we go from dam site to dam site and see what's actually happening on the ground. That's how my collective was formed in 2019. It was an invitation from the Lahore Biennale. So I thought maybe to expand that opportunity for other people as well.

Actually Pak Khawateen Painting Club, stands for the Good Girls or Pure Pakistani Women's Painting Club from Urdu. And I was wondering, why did you choose this name?

Yes. So water is really like a man's issue to deal with. If you go to the water department or if you go to the department that generates electricity or spaces which have to do with water decision making, it's all men. In the water department I saw only two women. There was one who was a librarian. The other one was in the PR department. So women don't really have a role in what has to do with water, although now statistics are coming out that most farmers in some parts of the country are women because men leave for urban towns to work there. And it's the women who are the agriculturists and they get affected by how much water they get. So I thought, what if we infiltrate these very masculine spaces? This architecture is also very masculine. They are huge and they are kind of like ejaculating water when you go there. So, what if we infiltrate these spaces as these good women and we don't pose as a threat? Because the government had declared that if anybody criticized the dam, they would be charged of treason. So what if we go as these good girls, wearing these nice girl guide uniforms —and they also kind of mimic troops of the bureaucracy and the military. We have these badges, these medals. We have a uniform with the Pakistani flag. So when we started walking around in those uniforms, we would be taken very seriously. We would be considered as somebody official. Otherwise, if you're in your regular clothes, people just assume you are just another housewife who's nagging and is trying to just distract people. But if you are in a uniform, it is a totally different dynamic. So it was really fun. It was also a performative act where we execute these expeditions wearing uniforms and also have our logos. Now we started having our own departments. We really tried to have fun with the bureaucracy of it.

During your first expedition, if I remember correctly, you visited six dams, right? Some of them were from the 1960s and some of them were newer. What were your findings there and what was your urge, besides the water politics, which I understand are very important in Pakistan, to visit the dams?

There was a really interesting article that I had read about this Indian nuclear power plant and nuclear weapons, which both India and Pakistan have and they have become like this collective conscience of nationalism. So even these mega dams are collectively a nationalistic propaganda object as well, but nobody has seen them. So I thought, what if we also become witness to them? And because they are obviously on rivers and these rivers were a source of life for thousands of years. You find some of the oldest civilizations of the world on the main river, which is Indus. So we thought, what if we look at the peripheries (to see) what the dam did, what was lost, what was around it, what was the ancient life around it, or even the most recent life around it. And we found a lot of material to work around.

Since you are, you know, a visual artist working on your own work, then you founded an artist residency and you were running it for some years and now you're also part of this collective. So my question would be, how do you see your individual practice merging with the collective one?

My work was kind of an individual artistic work before the collective. Because I was running this artist residency I was more of an administrator or curator or somebody who had it all, somebody who was kind of facilitating other artists. The forming of the collective was to share those responsibilities equally and share resources as well as skill sets. But we also understand that we are also individuals and we also have our own practices. So our own practice will also kind of deviate and some projects will be completely different from what we're doing in the collective and some of them may overlap. That depends from project to project.

But I would say that the residency in Murree and the collective kind of overlap because the residency is also situated in an area which is very artificially produced by the British for themselves. And the dams go back to 1880s when the British started harnessing water. One of the projects of the British statecraft was that these rivers are unruly and they needed to be made into a machine as a resource to produce agriculture for the people. So that harnessing project was a smaller one. They started with just building canals and then they started making these barrages, and then eventually World Bank came up with a solution for Pakistan to make these mega dams. And so this is like a continuation of the British project. And so you could say that both these spaces are interlinked.

So going back to the research that you've been conducting here during your one month residency in Athens, you decided to look further into the notion of Third World modernism and how actually modernism played a decisive role in the nation building process and into the social welfare projects of Pakistan. And I am wondering what was your starting point?

Pakistan has always been a water scarce region and it has made this five rivers, but two of the rivers now flow into India. It was called 'the land of the seven rivers' in ancient Hindu texts. This was really like a space where ancient civilizations could thrive because there was so much water around. But with the British coming in a lot of that changed and they really kind of tightened it all up. They made these very regimented irrigation systems all across and when Pakistan and India were two separate countries, that whole irrigation system was cut into half and the British who were leaving thought that maybe they would negotiate and come up with a solution. But the first thing India did was to shut off all the waters and it kind of stayed in the psyche of the Pakistani government that India can do it any time because all the rivers flow through India. So when they did these major negotiations two of the river rights were given to India and in place of those two rivers, Pakistan got two dams.

Recently, again, this whole paranoia kicked in again in 2018. A report from the Pakistani government came that Pakistan is going to run out of water in 2025. This was the same time when South Africa also had gone to the zero day where there was no water. But it wasn't clear. I was looking at these reports. It wasn't clear how are we going to run out of that water. Are the aquifers going to be dry or are the rivers going to be running dry? Are the glaciers going to be running dry? What's going to be lost? So that kind of triggered my whole idea. The only solution that the government came up was to build more dams. But that really creates a lot of problems for people who are in the south and it really dries up their agricultural lands. So I thought that we'll make a collective and we would go from site to site, see what dams they've built and what's really happening there. What if we go in as the good girls and we don't pose as as a threat? That's how this whole thing was triggered.

This was an individual research because I'm also interested in expanding that time period of the 1960s and 1970s in Pakistan, which was more like a time period to modernize. So at the same time you were letting go of colonialism, you were no longer a colony of the British and you wanted to be a modern country and show the world that you've come this far. And in Nehru's famous words dams are going to be the temples of India. So we were kind of following suit and also mimicking what India was doing and also it was like this kind of race towards who would be a more modern country. This whole time period was used to expand on that research because I feel that there's so many avenues that you can enter in. It wasn't just dams or water, which was being looked at, but it was also the music that was being influenced at that time. People were artists were traveling in Europe, also coming back with ideas of modern paintings. Modernism was coming in. So modernity and modernism are like two things which are coming into this period. And it's really interesting for me because it's not mimicry of the West, but it's also kind of finding your own way of how to let go of your previous generations' influences and of finding experimentation.

I understand that as part of your research, there are many links that you're trying to connect in order to unpack this notion. On the one hand, I see the ecological issues and the ecological disasters that are linked to these building projects, but also you bring up issues that have to do with aesthetics and I was wondering, what are the connections that you see, that you want to bring out between these two?

Yes. So, I find those two decades, 1960s and 1970s, and you could say early 1980s, really interesting, because it was the time of futurism as well, when the World Bank and all these organizations were looking at future data, like how much food people would need, how much agriculture needs to be produced, how much water people need. With futurism, there's also these esthetics where you have Star Trek coming in and that kind of electronic music is being experimented with and those ideas were also coming to Pakistan. And if you see power plants or the control rooms of hydro dams, they look like something out of a spaceship in Star Trek and all this cold war era period aesthetics that are really interesting —they also look retro, sci-fi. So, I was interested in developing that and also bringing in the music of that time. For the first project, we didn't really experiment so much with the music, but with the second one we have. It was really about exploring that time, because it was a crucial time for a lot of the countries, including Pakistan, where you see that all these countries were very liberal. They were very westernized countries and suddenly in the 1980s we all —in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan— have an Islamic dictator and things really changed, even aesthetically. So the 1960s and 1970s were really like a different kind of an era which is not experienced by me, but I am interested in the visual culture of that time.

Pakistan, also, because it was a new country, was interested in promoting itself as this space where people could come and travel. It was supposed to be this hippie trail, and they also wanted people to take connecting flights from Pakistan. So they started promoting the airlines and the airlines became like a brand ambassador of Pakistan. The airlines also had this dance troupe —a dance and music troupe. They would go from country to country, travel with officials and do classical dance performances or experimental music and they also came out with a lot of cassette tapes of just music. They were putting electronic music into folk songs. It became really this thriving space for artists to work in. They were also exoticizing Pakistan. So they would show beautiful Pakistani women in front of beautiful landscapes. And they hired Pierre Cardin, the French designer, as somebody who would design the uniforms. But slowly you could also see the degradation of the uniform. It had very simple lines —a straightforward uniform— and slowly, as the country becomes more Islamized and there's more influence coming from Islamic dictators, the uniform also becomes more baggy. It becomes a little different as well.

Well, the stories that you share about how your country was trying to interpret this modernist project that was coming from abroad brings to my mind the way that things were also imported here in Greece. I was wondering, since you decided to come to Athens, what was your urge to be here? Were there any links that you were wishing to find during your time here? Why did you decide to come to Athens?

One of the most interesting parts of Pakistan is the capital, the federal capital of Pakistan. It is called Islamabad and that was also, you could say, one of the biggest projects of the 1960s dictatorship at the time. They wanted an elitist city where only bureaucrats and politicians would live. Because it's very close to the center of the military, the military found it very convenient to control bureaucrats and politicians from there. They hired Doxiadis, the Greek architect, to help them out. Although Doxiadis talks about ekistics and the human scale of objects and buildings, over there he didn't really apply it so much. And also because he had to pander to the dictator and the military leadership of the time. There's a lot being written about how Islamabad is not a failed city, but it's an elitist city. It is a very controlled city and also a very dry one. Although it's a beautiful city. It is in the midst of a a valley and the mountains are all around it. There's a lot of work being done about it. So I visited the Doxiadis Archives and it was really interesting to find his diaries from Pakistan. It was like this scrapbook where he's invited to Pakistan and they ask him to travel from south to north. He is documenting vernacular architecture, but the way he is looking at it, is a little bit altered from like a Western eye. Obviously he only spends three years there and then the military dictatorship decides, "okay, we don't want to give him so much power", and they use his plans, but they don't fully work with him in the end. They don't really get along so much. But they also bring in other Italian architects to build the presidential house, this massive building. But the problem with Islamabad is that there's no public space or there are no roundabouts. And that's kind of deliberate because if you have a public space or a roundabout, roundabouts are supposed to be centers for protests. So nobody can congregate in parks in Islamabad and have a protest. And because it's such a controlled city, the land prices are so high that you wouldn't really have your middle class or working class coming in to work there. It excludes people. So there's a lot of criticism on it. And then he had another project in Karachi, which was a housing project for refugees who came in from India to Pakistan to settle there, which had also its own failings.

I just find Doxiadis this really whimsical, interesting character because he had these boat symposiums where he would put different people on a boat and they would go from Santorini, Mykonos and end up in Delos. So I thought those must be like fun trips to go to. And he also invited a lot of Pakistanis. Not a lot, maybe like five and I think only one went. There were a lot of people who would refuse to go or not go at all, but there were also some celebrities —celebrity academics— who would end up on the boat. What he did was that he also tried to set up a school for architects in Pakistan. The idea was that they would spend one year in Athens and then the second year in Pakistan and they would work on the projects that Doxiadis was working on. And I think they did three rounds and it was kind of like a failure. Yesterday, I found these reports, confidential reports, on each of the students, and they had written how awful the students were.

That's funny.

One of them was expelled because he never came to classes. He ended up marrying a Greek girl and ran off with her. The best students were two women, but because they were so shy and, you know, coming out of a patriarchal culture they were the only ones who were working hard. But most of them were really rowdy. They were saying, "we don't understand anything". Their complaints are literally translated from Urdu to English. So they are saying "everything is going over our heads", because that's an Urdu phrase. There was a lot of communication problem between the teachers and the students.

Well, the diaries and also these reports are really interesting findings. Do you see them somehow fitting into your the future of your research?

Yeah, because I am also interested on the flow of ideas, like how ideas were flowing in or even going out. So this is really like a concrete proof of somebody coming in and actually teaching Pakistani future architects or urban designers. It is interesting that you have like this concrete evidence of that happening. Otherwise, you did have like a lot of artists who would leave for Paris, stay there for one month, but you wouldn't really know what they were doing over there or what was happening, who were they talking to, etc. So those kind of archives are lost, or maybe they never existed. So this is a concrete proof and it's really funny as well —the kind of complaints that both sides have had for each other. Also there weren't these visa regimes at that time. So it was easier for people to move back and forth and influence each other.

That's really interesting, your last comment, because one would say that, you know, now we live in a global society. Everything is flowing through the Internet. We can travel more easily. And actually, it's not so easy to travel and to cross borders anymore.

Not at all. I think, if you have a visa from the Global South, then it's a very restricted world for you. You live in a world of a lot of walls. So, yes, before the 1960s, you could just pack up your suitcase and move to Paris for a year and that was also affordable. But that's not even affordable anymore. Even the Indians that I met, Indian friends, they also had the same issues that you can't just move anywhere.

Well, Saba, I have one last question before we close our discussion today. I was wondering, how are you planning to continue this research in Pakistan now that you're going back? Also, what are your next steps more broadly speaking?

I took the list of students who came to Athens. I don't think any of them are living. They were like 35 or 30 when they came here in the 1960s. So I am not sure if they are alive, but obviously their children are and they probably do have some records or know like what happened, how they got influenced by it. This is not the only program that would be like a training program for young Pakistanis. So, I am interested to contact their families and see who they were, what happened, if they continued anything. And obviously I have to look at more music from that era.

Nice. Thank you so much for sharing. It was really a pleasure to talk with you and to get to know more about your research and I hope that we will have the chance for you to come back soon.

Yeah, thank you for inviting me. I think it's been a really amazing space here to do research and to think and also to just kind of think about how to work in collectives, because also how you guys work has been really interesting to watch and thank you for having me here.

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.