At AAN Art Space and Museum in Karachi, the air feels heavy with dampness, as if the monsoon has seeped into the very walls. ‘Sailaab’, curated by Amra Ali, gathers artists across generations into a chorus of voices — all speaking from within the flood — retrieving memories, fragments and histories of water’s encroachment, allowing them to settle beside one another in quiet tension.

‘Sailaab’ takes its title from the Urdu word for flood, evoking both literal inundation and metaphorical force. In Pakistan, floods are never simply ‘natural disasters’ — they are crises magnified by state neglect, inequitable development and the dispossession of the most vulnerable.

Ali’s curatorial note sets the tone: this is not a show polished into seamless narratives, but one that welcomes disruption. The ruptures and uneven flows mimic the unruly, often devastating ways in which water reclaims land. What emerge are layered accounts of displacement and loss, but also of resilience and transformation.

Few works embody continuity more powerfully than Rasheed Araeen’s Chakras. Since the 1970s, Araeen has been throwing painted discs into bodies of water, collapsing art and environment into continuous movement. In 2019, Araeen’s brother revisited this practice through nine fluorescent red disks released into the waters off Hawke’s Bay. Their journey is part protest, part offering — drifting not only against untreated sewage and landfill development but also against the constraints of borders and commodification. Photographs of the performances and display of the Chakras in the show echo this theme of disappearance and re-emergence.

A timely exhibition sees artists confronting recurring flooding across Pakistan, not just as natural disasters but as lived crises of loss and resilience

Where the discs speak of continuity, Malika Abbas’ Where It Once Flowed meditates on rupture. Her series (2020-2025) reads like a diary of loss: “It came like a flash, wiping out everything in its path…each time it carved a new course.” Her text-based installations and photographic interventions testify to landscapes altered beyond recognition. Suspended between mourning and adaptation, they remind us how rivers rewrite the ground beneath our feet. Abbas also turns her lens toward the dislocated — children improvising play, women ferrying water. These quiet images position resilience not as romance but as survival.

Arif Mahmood’s Sailaab (2010), shot during the Sindh floods, anchors the exhibition. Contact sheets printed on expired silver gelatin paper yield ghostly, unstable images. Chemical imperfections echo the erosion of lives and landscapes, turning photography into fragile testimony. These photographs refuse to monumentalise suffering; instead, they remind us that memory itself can be damaged, incomplete.

Sohail Zuberi’s responses are poetic. His video Threshold is displayed on the floor of the gallery: “At the entrance, the water gushes in. I remain still, helpless. A moment of breach. Inside and outside collapse into one.” Other works, viewed through small holes like a bioscope show, invite reflective peeks into catastrophe, echoing older street entertainments where images unfolded as moving tales.

For Saad Aslam Ali, the flood enters the intimate space of the family home. His ongoing project We Were Here recovers photographs destroyed in the 2020 Karachi floods. Printed, soaked and collaged, they carry saltwater stains of disaster. Faces dissolve, edges warp, yet the broken images resist erasure. Sculptural iterations made from soaked prints feel hauntingly alive, acknowledging impermanence while refusing nostalgia.

If Abbas and Ali draw us into personal memory, Namra Khalid redirects attention to systemic collapse. As the founder of Community Climate Design, she develops citizen-powered tools to democratise disaster information. Her research initiative, Karachi Cartography, overlays maps of the city’s past, present and possible futures, while her app Aafatinfo, currently in beta testing, collects live flooding reports into a communal map. These projects read as both urgent tools and conceptual artworks, and they also re-imagine adaptation when information flows laterally, powered by citizens rather than authorities.

Threading through all these works is Ali’s insistence that the exhibition remain unfinished, like “an unedited conversation, an unfinished painting.” Disruption, after all, is part of the flood’s logic. Here it is generative, allowing viewers to drift between Araeen’s open seas, Abbas’s scarred landscapes, Mahmood’s ghostly photographs, Ali’s drowned family albums and Khalid’s cartographies.

In Karachi, a city both defined and undone by its waters, the exhibition feels like both lament and manifesto. Like the flood itself, ‘Sailaab’ leaves behind altered terrain: disrupted, unfinished, yet alive with unexpected currents.

‘Sailaab’ is on display at AAN Art Space and Museum in Karachi from August 21-October 18, 2025

Rumana Husain is a writer, artist and educator. She is the author of two coffee-table books on Karachi, and has authored and illustrated 90 children’s books

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 5th, 2025