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Shahana Rajani

회복의 네 막 Four Acts of Recovery | 2025 | 17’36”
Courtesy of Shahana Rajani

Synopsis
Four Acts of Recovery follows a fisher family from the Indus Delta as they turn to drawing and painting to navigate infrastructural violence and climate collapse. Displaced from their ancestral Mul creek to Karachi, the family searches for ways to sustain sacred relations to shrines and to homelands that are rapidly disappearing as the sea advances. As the delta is submerged, the work traces how visual practices are mobilized within coastal communities to generate new forms of devotion, dissent, and belonging. Rajani connects mural painting—of shrines, rivers, and the sea—to Islamic traditions of talismanic drawing for protection and recovery, where image-making becomes both archive and ritual. In this sense, drawing does not simply represent loss; it makes space for sacred and ecological worlds amid erasure, and insists on relation as a practice of endurance.


About the artist
Shahana Rajani is an artist whose work examines the visualities, landscapes, and infrastructures of development, militarization, and ecological resistance in Pakistan. Community-based and collaborative research is central to her practice. Working across moving image, installation, and printed matter, she engages dissident histories and practices of representation, relation, and survival. She is co-founder (with Zahra Malkani) of ‘Karachi LaJamia,’ an experimental project devoted to seeking and sharing eco-pedagogies emerging from struggles around land and water in the city. Rajani is currently based in Tkaronto, Canada.