“Like most people who dwell within its borders, my relationship with the nation-state of Pakistan has always been fraught,” says artist and researcher Zahra Malkani, whose haunting new exhibition Noorani Metal Sound explores the ecological resistance across Pakistan’s heavily exploited coastal and delta regions.
“The ecological and coastal context I grew up in is so deeply and thoroughly mapped onto my subconscious and my being,” Malkani tells East End Review.
“I grew up in Karachi which is a coastal megacity in the larger region of the Indus Delta. The Indus is an ancient and sacred river, and the delta is absolutely devastated by a colonial legacy of dams, barrages, canals and sand mining.”
She explains that while Pakistan pursued infrastructure-led development through dams and ports, the strong resistance by communities who live in the region has led to “brutal militarisation and securitisation.”
“Thankfully though, the resistance has also been relentless,” she says, citing “an incredibly rich history of activism, scholarship, poetry and music devoted to the river and the sea.”
She continues: “Here, much of the politics, culture and language is shaped by a long-fostered mystical tradition of being awe-struck, awe-inspired, entranced by the water. I grew up hearing these songs, reading this literature, witnessing these movements, and this continued study helps me foster a deeper intimacy with the environment.”
The exhibition, which is the artist’s first major UK solo show, consists of two striking works, both of which draw from Malkani’s many years of research and field recordings in the aquatic regions of Pakistan, looking at how traditions of water-defence, water-worship and water-memory are transmitted in songs and sound.
The first work, a three-part cassette box set, features mystical music and folklore, protest sounds, conversations, prayers and chanting and poetry, while the second, an audio-visual installation, combines sound, sculpture and moving image work that draws on Sur Purab, a Sindhi folk song about a woman who, entranced, is inexplicably drawn to walk along a mysterious path.
Malkani reflects on the piece: “In this work, the funeral procession, the protestors, the pilgrims and those who search for a missing beloved, all walk together in a mysterious footwork to the beats of devotional praise and war drums.”
An accompanying two-channel soundscape draws sounds of ritual ceremonial mourning: songs, cries and laments that echo unspeakable massacres and brutalities.
Emotion surfaces through chants and layered sound - at times piercing, scratchy and fragile, building from slow drumming into a crescendo of overlapping voices before gradually calming into silence, while interwoven narratives unfold through fragmented video of a missing father and a woman singing a lullaby, punctuated by the unresolved line: "To think is a crime, to love is a sin.”
Woven together with recordings from Karachi's oldest aquatic neighbourhoods, the work is structured around sounds of joyous praise for the martyred and the missing.
Malkani describes the process of recording and weaving together these sounds as “slow, fluid and meandering”, noting that the recordings were by-products of her travels not just for research but also to meet friends and family, to attend meetings and protests, to visit shrines and spend time by the sea.
She explains: “I never set out to collect an archive, but once I noticed this body of sound that was emerging, I leaned into the listening and the recording of it.”
“I was eager to share but also incredibly hesitant because a lot of this material is sacred and sensitive, and I want to honour that. It took a lot of time for me to develop different formats in which I felt comfortable sharing these sounds bit by bit - through live listening sessions, mixes, radio essays.”
Malkani approaches these audio-visual pieces like a series of mixes, noting that “a mix feels like a fluid, watery medium, where sounds flow into, across, and along each other”; a site where conversations, songs, recitations and noise can “mingle together.”
She continues: “A clean, contained song, or a track, is a colonial invention. In my recordings, songs don’t really begin or end. Conversations turn into songs and songs move into prayers and prayers burst into laughter, and the crying babies or the cows mooing or the aunties talking over each other aren’t interruptions, they’re all part of the chorus.”
She explains that this is why she is minimal with her editing. “It is important to me not to isolate a song or a sound from its context - I don’t want to reduce sacred, dynamic and intrepid practices to aesthetic objects. The choices I make about what particular sounds to weave together are informed both by play and by politics.”
On her own sense of place and identity, she adds: “I think a sense of identity is something we nurture and sustain in and with community… I found a sense of identification in this political/mystical tradition by participating in it. Working with this material has been a way of maintaining connection and abiding by relationships to the movements, to people, to the river and the sea and the songs.”
Reflecting on how she hopes visitors will approach Noorani Metal Sound, Malkani says: “I hope people will feel moved to sing more songs to babies and to learn more stories from their elders and to chant a lot louder at the next protest. Something I have learnt from this work is that duty is a beautiful antidote to despair, and I hope that comes through as well.”
Noorani Metal Sound
Until 21 June 2026
Auto Italia
44 Bonner Road
Bethnal Green
E2 9JS
