Close to Karachi (Extract)
– an exhibition of new work by Fari Bradley and Chris Weaver, featuring
sound, sculpture, print and found objects. The works are responses by
the artists to a month’s residency in Pakistan’s only port, the world’s
second most populous city.
For their research the artists visited workshops making Pakistan’s distinctive truck art, and recorded the people and thoroughfares of the city. Touring lectures about their practice at three major universities, the conversation became a two-way
research project – the dialogue orbiting around issues of social class
(illustrated through the travel systems), the streets as locii of
everyday life, and the politics of sound and silence. The works featured
in this show range from photography (as a practice of creating
“totems”), a sound installation responding to the materiality of the
pieces and found objects that provide a dissonant postscript to
Pakistan’s history of self-determination.
Exhibition text extract by Natasha Morris Courtauld Institute of Art:
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‘Close
to Karachi’ presents the city’s social spaces as a fragmentary look
into a place so dense and multifaceted that it is impossible to come to
know as a whole.
Once called the ‘Gateway to Pakistan’, Karachi is home to 20 million living in a tightly constricted space. Once a thriving
commercial centre, the country’s only port-city now sprawls into
beaches and bazaars against the backdrop of structural socio-economic
chaos and architectural decay and abeyance. What would the soundtrack to
such a metropolis be? With its pronounced class divisions and manifold
geographical boundaries, Karachi is a patchwork and a territory ripe for
anthrophonic investigation. Atmospheric moments of multi-layered sonic
bustle are punctuated often by insulated, resonant single notes. In most
areas, the public domain of the street is frequented only by the
underprivileged; the working class and the poor, while the rest are
sheltered from this sonic ensemble inside their vehicles, engaging with
the world around them almost accidentally, at a traffic light or on a
jam, where the world literally comes knocking on their windows, asking
for help. Amongst derelict structures in Art Nouveau and Venetian Gothic
style, between the mass of rubbish that threatens to engulf everything
around it, who are the ones to survive these harsh conditions and how
can we create a visual language to convey the full range of the city’s
complexities?
This exhibition seeks to examine different
converging streams in the rich tapestry of Karachi’s society. At first,
there is the street-level where on the edges of thriving informal
economies, the dense soundscapes tell 100s of stories at once; in order
to survive the city how do inhabitants manage escape this dense
background noise? The second is the tale of modernity, a mysticism
embodied by the ornate trucks and buses, the very same motor vehicles
that drown out the sounds of the everyday life they pass, and where
children are enlisted to work and endangered. And last, there is a new
invasion of artifacts, charity donations from Britain, unwanted and
unsold, filling the markets of Karachi with very personal, but now
broadly anonymous histories from the very country from which Pakistan
claimed its independence.
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Preview 6-9pm October 15th 2015
Close to Karachi | Bradley-Weaver
16 October – 28 October 2015
Edge of Arabia Gallery, London SW11 4AU (Map)Close to Karachi is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
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