Zahra Malkani

Artist Zahra Malkani whose sound installation Sada Sada is featured in the exhibition Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen at Nottingham Contemporary, shares a special contribution to this broadcast which expands on the themes and sounds within her work and practice. Sada Sada is a sound installation which draws on Zahra Malkani’s (b. 1986 Karachi, Pakistan) extensive, in-depth fieldwork in Pakistan revealing how land, local communities, spirituality and language contribute to an ecosystem under threat from environmental violence, militarised conflict, floods, heat waves and dispossession. Malkani introduces the broadcast: ‘In what follows you will hear a mix that traverses the sonic borderlands and beyonds of Pakistan. From Balochistan to Badakshan. Stateless sounds that sing of love and landscape, that map secret, sacred geographies, that shatter the militarised illusions of nationhood in clamorous recall. We begin in dhamal and we end with a wai, which is to say we begin in ecstasy and we end in lament, which, admittedly, can sound inexplicably similar in these sonic worlds.’