lahore biennale collateral - “tomorrow isnt promised” 2024
“TOMORROW ISN’T PROMISED
A Collateral Event to Lahore Biennale 03
What is the present, if not the future of the past?
The Exhibition aims to take a multi-faceted view of our environmental histories, through art, design and research based practices, with a continuing discourse on the environment and its elements of water air and land. It offers insights into several personal journeys and trajectories and how they might offer lessons of resilience and perhaps course correction.
Curated by Fatma Shah”
https://www.instagram.com/p/DBeazgqi_B-/?hl=en&img_index=1
river city is a project created to imagine the river ravi in its glory. rising from 14,000 feet in the mid himalayas, the river originally streamed down boulders, gorges and forests into the indian ocean – which it does to a point, but now only trickles into the territory of pakistan. As part of an enquiry into the historic ecology and history of the riverine areas around the present ravi, this presentation is a mere speculation . there is no future to predict or a past to lament here - this is an evocation of mere possibilities. this series of objects are inspired by the harappan civilization , as well as the gupta and the sikh periods, to colonial times . today many projects for grand developments along the banks of the ravi are poised to go ahead, and there many who oppose them; but highly fertile alluvial plains are being requisitioned, generational farming communities are being edged out and the boatmen are all but gone.
yet, for the moment the viewer stands here, amongst these undefined objects, it is with the hope they forget the ruin and live within the cycle of the once mighty ravi.