Gol Kamra (Urdu for “round room”) is a collaborative, experimental space, in which I create alongside my partner, visual artist and photographer Jahanzeb Haroon.
Stations of the Cross (2021)
[Curated by Dr. Aaron Rosen and Rev. Dr. Catriona Laing]
Virtual exhibition hosted by the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion, Washington, D.C. (link)
“The memorial we have chosen to link to Station 2, which finds Jesus taking up the cross and beginning his journey to Mount Calvary, is a remnant of the shared history of Pakistan and India from before the Partition of 1947. It is one of a series of kos minars — 16th-to 18th-century milestones that dotted the historic Grand Trunk Road in the Subcontinent, marking the distance of a kos (an ancient Indian unit, roughly equalling two miles, with its roots in the Sanskrit word krosa, which means to cry or call out and can be said to represent the distance at which a human can hear another's call — in other words, an earshot).
One of the routes along which these minars, or pillars, stretched was from Agra (India) to Lahore (Pakistan). Using Google Maps, we were able to trace around thirteen extant kos minars and four of them happen to be in Lahore – very much neglected, standing bizarre and forgotten in the middle of fields and, in one case, a row of tenements. What fascinated us was that these unadorned, unremarkable structures still stand by the side of the Grand Trunk Road, which still ribbons through Pakistan and India, as indifferent to, yet as articulating of, the border between both countries as the minars themselves.
The pandemic — trailing with itself its own set of boundaries, sectionings, and forced separations — evoked the ghost of the Partition and the stories of our predecessors’ journeys; their partings from friends and loved ones; the inherent loneliness of the refugee; the lifelong struggle with trauma; the crushing weight of their cross.
Through our work, we seek to revive the etymological link between kos as a measure of distance and krosa, the act of calling out to someone, or being heard by someone across a distance, to underscore the loneliness so many were plunged into, because of the pandemic, and the crucialness of human connection in this time.”
Home Alone Together (2020)
[Curated by S. Billie Mandle and Dr. Aaron Rosen]
Virtual exhibition hosted by Image Journal (link)
“Currently quarantined together in our apartment in Lahore, we are looking at our home as a place dense with words and thoughts left hanging in mid-air or piling, calcified, on top of yesterday’s remains.”
