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ABOUT

ABOUT

The Good Girl’s Painting Club in their second expedition venture to the seven barrages built over the River Indus for plein air painting. These painters don uniforms inspired by Pierre Cardin’s 1960s design for Pakistan International Airlines’ air hostesses. They enter sites built and imagined by powerful men to produce agriculture and energy for the nation - only to transgress and question their validity.

The waters of the Indus River were an impetus for mushrooming of towns like Mohenjodro and forts, allowing the basis for prosperous trading routes to Arabia and China and syncretic Sufi and Buddhist traditions to travel and influence communities. With the arrival of capitalist colonialism and later in a postcolonial nation, large corporations and international banks attempt to tame its waters with modern engineering of building dams and barrages — in a bid to maximize agricultural output while disturbing natural ecosystems. Indus has reduced to a trickle at the delta, killing its protective mangrove forests and aquatic life. The effects are already being felt in the form of the displacement of indigenous populations. These concerns are raised in the form of multimedia artworks rooted in field research that provoke and question the building of more structures over the river for economic development and water distribution —an agenda fanned by nationalist rhetoric. Our inspirations are derived from the Indus, with its deities, rituals, supernatural powers and folklore transcending religion and time, that buttress subaltern cultures and riverine communities.

Drawing the project title from Amitav Ghosh, supernatural forces, traditions and aesthetic forms challenge the masculine rubric of colonial modernity, the epitome of which is hydrological engineering oriented towards commercial agriculture. Resulting in the displacement of indigenous populations, the unequal division of resources and the inundation of histories, hydrological engineering finds an unexpected foe in its (not so) ‘Pak’ provocateurs (members).
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