Wildfire II

In the second of a three-part series, Berlin-based Pakistani artist Bani Abidi reflects on heartbreak and society, introducing new allies and old friends while considering friendship amid collective grief. For Wildfire II, Abidi presents films by Shahana Rajani and Hira Nabi.

FILMS

Shahana Rajani - Four Acts of Recovery, 2025 (17:36)

Four Acts of Recovery follows a fisher family from the Indus Delta as they turn to practices of drawing and painting to navigate unprecedented infrastructural violence and climate collapse. Displaced from their ancestral Mul creek to the city of Karachi, this family searches for old and new ways of maintaining sacred relation with their shrines and disappearing homelands. As the delta is fast submerged by the sea, the work traces how visual practices are being mobilized and transformed by coastal communities to engender new forms of devotion, dissent and belonging. It connects the practice of painting shrine and sea murals, to Islamic traditions of drawing talismans for protection and recovery. Drawing becomes a ritual that makes space for sacred and ecological worlds amidst annihilation.

Shahana Rajani - a cipher for the missing, 2022 (7:52)

A cipher for the missing explores the Baloch practice of massad in Karachi, Pakistan, whereby the date palm tree is invoked to help locate the missing. In this practice, dating back to Bibi Fatima (the daughter of Prophet Muhammad), the tree grants access to realms out of sight. The date palm also features as the main emblem of the paramilitary, worn on uniforms and painted on watchtowers and check posts across the city of Karachi. As surveillant technologies of the military-state seek to render all bodies visible, while disappearing those deemed threatening, massad emerges as an alternate practice of recovery that centers relationality and connection to a more-than-human world. A cipher made of leaves that renders the military’s disappearance tactics legible to the very communities that bear the brunt of its violence.

Hira Nabi - All That Perishes At The Edge Of Land, 2019 (30:00) 

In this docu-fictional work, 'Ocean Master', a decommissioned container vessel is anthropomorphised, and enters into a dialogue with several workers at the Gadani yards. The conversation moves between dreams and desire, places that can be called home, and the structural violence embedded in the act of dismembering a ship at Gadani. As the workers recall the homes and families they left behind, the long work days mesh indistinguishably into one another, the desperation that they carry with them like shackles rises to the forefront, and they are forced to confront the realities of their work in which they are faced with death every day. How may they survive and look towards the future?