KARACHI: Arguably the greatest English language poet of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot, in his masterpiece The Wasteland, touches upon the theme of water with at least a couple of persuasive connotations. One, that it should make us pay heed to mortality — by having one of the characters drown in the sea; two, lack of water signifies infertility.

Artist Saba Khan’s latest exhibition titled Water Explorer that can be seen at the Canvas Art Gallery has the same theme, albeit with socio-political overtones. In our country, we are often faced by issues such as construction of dams and water supply hindrances. On the surface, they sound like civic problems. However, given the nature of our society, it is difficult not to look at them through the prism of politics.

What is the explorer about, though? Khan’s statement elucidates, “A water explorer journeys to the banks of the River Indus and its unfamiliar terrain to study the flow of water and blockades created by the Master. From the mountains in the north to the delta on the southern edge, its unruliness is tamed and its flow is broken into a benign trickle. Water machines and architecture such as gates, canals, barrages and dams, a project conceived and executed over a hundred years, disrupt the pathway of Khawaja Khizr and his palla fish. The water that harnessing the project has multiplied exponentially and continues to control it through engineering and machinery. The water explorer re-imagines the machines and proposes dysfunctional machinery that contains water memories and astrological drawings from the book Kitab al Tafhim of the polymath and explorer Al-Biruni.”

This sounds like a lot to process. It’s not. As the viewer spends more time viewing the artworks — such as ‘Voyager at the Barrage Gate’ — made on canvas, paper and stretched board etc, the message of the artist will come through with clarity. To boot, her command of the technique that she employs to do that has a great deal of grace and poise, essential for a subject that she’s chosen to focus on.

The exhibition concludes on Sept 2.

Published in Dawn, September 1st, 2021