Zahra Malkani’s Hum of Ecological Reverence

The ecological devastation of the Indus basin lies at the heart of Pakistani artist and researcher Zahra Malkani’s first solo exhibition in Europe, ‘Sada Sada’. This sombre and sparse presentation is centred around an eponymous, eight-channel sound installation composed of recordings the artist made during fieldwork she undertook in her native province of Sindh. From a dozen or so speakers stacked in the gallery’s centre, we hear the sounds of water rushing through one of the region’s seasonal rivers, chants in Balochi from nearby Gadani beach, home to the world’s third-largest ship-breaking yard, and women activists speaking at the 2023 Climate March in Karachi.

Here, Malkani expands on ‘Our Watery Relations’ (2021–24), a collective research project executed under the umbrella of Karachi LaJamia, the self-described ‘anti-institution’ for radical pedagogy and spatial practice that she co-founded with artist and curator Shahana Rajani in 2015. The work examined the effects of urban growth on Karachi’s aquatic landscapes and the ecological damage caused by concrete infrastructure built with sand mined from the city’s rivers.

In ‘Sada Sada’, much weight is placed on the political struggles surrounding the regional river system which – as attested to by the catastrophic floods that submerged roughly a third of Pakistan in 2022 – is at the forefront of the climate crisis. A two-channel video of a woman seated on the prow of a boat moving slowly through the floodwaters hints at the scale of the destruction, whilst footage of activists drawing maps of disappearing waterways and ruined shrines around Lake Manchar – whose waters once supported generations of fishing communities but are now contaminated by poisonous industrial waste – links environmental spoliation to centuries-old practices of religious pilgrimage.

For Malkani, the sacred is political and resonates with the ways in which protest is inscribed within acts of veneration and prayer. Evoking what the exhibition text terms a ‘thikana’ – a space of pilgrimage, collective mourning and remembrance – the speakers are adorned with scores of diyas (votive candles) commonly found at South Asian shrines. The tiled floors and walls of the former industrial laundry that now hosts Konsthall C reverberate with the steady rhythm of women beating their chests and chanting in Saraiki the popular Shia lament, ‘Haye Zainab’. A takeaway poster, Sada Sada – Score / Echopractice (2025), translates their refrain: ‘O! the thirst of Zainab. In the moments of her brother’s death.’ This song of protest evocatively connects the struggle to protect the Indus region with the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali, the third Shia Imam, during the seventh century Battle of Karbala. In the same work, the artist poetically plays on the Urdu word hum (us/we): ‘Oh mingling waters. Oh wandering seas. It feels so good to break. To become many. To become one. To become hum.’ 

In Urdu, sada (sound) derives from the Arabic word sadaan (echo). Yet, it also has a Sanskrit root meaning ‘eternal’. In this complex and densely layered work, sound functions not only as a medium binding voices across time and place, but also as a means of transmitting historical knowledge across generations – particularly among women. As translator Michael Sells observes in Approaching the Qur’an (1999), according to the Qur’an, humans are born forgetful, and practices such as recitation and prayer are embodied reminders of our roles and responsibilities as the stewards of collective memory. Malkani’s devotional practice offers similar reminders here: of those forms of life and worship desecrated by the ecocidal thrust of capitalist expansion; of intertwined histories of refusal and reverence; of what has been lost yet still vibrates in and around us; of what hums. 

Zahra Malkani’s ‘Sada Sada’ is on view at Konsthall C, Stockholm, until 23 March 

_{Main image: Zahra Malkani, Sada Sada, 2025, installation view. Courtesy: Konsthall C; photograph: Johan Österholm}