Daal dus khaan shehar lahore e ander
Bai kinnein boohey tay kinnian barian nein
Naley Das Khaan aothon dian ittaan
Kinnian tuttian tay kinnian saaran nein
Daal dus khaan shehr Lahore e Andar
Khooian kinnian mithian tey kinnian khaarian nein
Tell me, in the city of Lahore
How many doors and windows are there?
Tell me also about its bricks.
How many are still firm, and how many lie broken?
Tell me, inside the city of Lahore
How many wells have fresh water and how many are ruined with salt?
Infinite Nectar draws on the poetics of space by exploring abandoned Sikh heritage buildings in the city of Lahore (Pakistan). These spaces carry traces of the 1947 Partition of India and have been resilient in the face of power shifts, urban transformations and cycles of trauma throughout history. The artist unfolds these layers through the textures, architectural juxtapositions, and cracks within these spaces, overlaying them with animated mosaic-like stones and caressing them with a fragmented marble hand of Maharani Jindan Kaur, the last empress of the Sikh Empire and a revolutionary female character, who returns back to her place of origin and haunts the city like a ghost. The video invokes the cyclical movement of time, memory and human presence in these spatial palimpsests. It refers to the representation of memory by creating a series of mirrorings through the lost and found elements of spaces that have become the embodiment of the invisible.
Image credit: Infinite Nectar, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan. Lahore 2019. Image Courtesy: The artist and Green Art Gallery Dubai
The piece has been produced as a part of the 2nd Lahore Biennale 2020 in curatorial collaboration with Hajra Haider Karrar and supported by SAHA Association Supporting Contemporary Art From Turkey, National College of Arts Lahore and LUMS Gurmani Center for Languages and Literature
*The piece has been produced as a part of the 2nd Lahore Biennale 2020 in curatorial collaboration with Hajra Haider Karrar and supported by SAHA Association Supporting Contemporary Art From Turkey, National College of Arts Lahore and LUMS Gurmani Center for Languages and Literature
