Saba Khan

Saba Khan's multimedia work moves within the language of memorial, monument and public art. From lush beaded paintings of cakes to miniature dioramas of a bureaucrat's boring office; from flashing LED signs of stereotyped "Islamic art" to embellished textile banners honoring the mundane generator, she balances grandeur, artifice and satire in order to explore the cracks in the facade of life in her native Lahore, Pakistan. Saba holds a BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore and an MFA from Boston University supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. Her work was included in the Karachi Biennale 2018 and the Lahore Biennale 2020. Her solo exhibitions include 'ONE' at COMO (contemporary/modern) Museum of Art, Lahore (2019) and 'Zinda-dil-a’an-e-Lahore–Billboard Project' (2020), an initiative of the Lahore Biennale Foundation (LBF). In 2014, she founded Murree Museum Artist Residency, an artist-led initiative in a British colonial hill town, and in 2019 the satirical artist collective Pak Khawateen Painting Club was was triggered from the commission of Lahore Biennale 02. She recently won grants from the Sharjah Art Foundation (2020), the Graham Foundation (2020), the British Council (2020) and the Paul Mellon Centre. Khan teaches at the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan.

My research will create links between various nodes of ‘third-world modernism’, from colonial powers’ ambitions to extract and harness water, space-age fashion, aviation, electronic music projects, modernist paintings, notions of a ‘modern girl’, to international banks that continue to fund mega hydro dams in Pakistan.

The colonial ‘modernist project’ started from the annexation of Punjab (India at the time) in 1880, ‘The New Agrarian Frontier’, by the British statecraft. Colonial desire to harness the free-flowing Indus River snaking through the Sapta Sindhu (land of seven rivers) that used to crush towns under its torrential current, was slowly maimed by the colonizer’s will to turn nature into a resource and water into a machine. It laid out a complex irrigation system of canals and colonies, relocated populations and socially engineered Punjab and Sindh.

In the post-colonial era, American technocrat David Lilienthal and the World Bank permanently reshaped the landscape by creating the first monumental mega dam, Tarbela (1960s), which annihilated traditional farming methods, causing salinity and sea intrusion in the coast. The lack of water for the downstream indigenous groups led to the first climate refugees and transformed their millennia old livelihoods. Built in an era of space travel, the control room of Tarbela Dam resembles the inside of a spaceship.

In the newly formed Pakistan, its brand ambassador was its state-run airlines, whose air-hostesses were proudly advertised in space-age uniforms designed by French designer Pierre Cardin. The airlines with its own theater and music troupe remixed folk songs with electronic music.

Art was transformed with artists traveling to Europe for long periods, bringing back modernist style painting. In cinema and literature, a ‘modern girl’ was an urban, upper middle class, smoking-pants-wearing who had acquired mobility but an antithesis to tradition, and mostly excluded by the ‘masculine modernist project’.