When Pakistan’s devastating floods of 2022 swept across Sindh, the worst hit were, as always, women.
Yet their voices and even their names remained unheard over the chorus of experts and officials with much to say about, but little to lose from the impact of climate change.
Maryam Rahman is hoping to change that, giving new life to the unnamed victims of the flooding. Trained in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, she is apprenticed as a student of the Nastaliq practice to Ustad Imdad Ahmed at Hast-o-Neest in Lahore, where she also teaches at NCA and manages the art estate of the late Lala Rukh. Her work transforms the practice of writing in Nastaliq into performance, as she draws out the names of the countless unknown women whose lives were swept away during the disaster. As she draws, Zainub Jawaad speaks each name to the accompaniment of music from a flute played by Haider Rahman. Through this process, the rigour of the art combines with the supple Sindhi consonants; the intimacy of writing combines with performance, all coming together in a square, gallery space.
Rahman’s penning of the names in Nastaliq evokes the script most favored in Mughal courts, with each name falling like a stone into the rippling sound of the flute. This process, explains Maryam, aims to create zanana, a women-only space, in a world where women are often given no space. The overall performance piece, Zanana, opened in Istanbul on July 16. It culminates Rahman’s artist residency, hosted by Maumau Works in the Turkish metropolis.
Along with the performance, her exhibition displays the artwork produced as part of the residency, combining her calligraphy practice with charcoal and graphite on vasli. Viewed from a distance, each piece seems to represent a landscape of earth and sky and water, with small imperfections that resolve, as one approaches, into the names of women. One such piece, Maayun, has the names emerging from the surface of the water, like the heads of swimmers. Another, Raasti, divides the names between the jagged shore and the dark water, while in Sussi, the names erupt from a single point, unable to be contained.
The floodwaters in Pakistan eventually receded—with stark warnings of their return as climate change continues to wreak havoc globally. Lawmakers and policy experts thundered about ‘loss and damage,’ lamenting the price paid by Pakistan for the climate catastrophe caused by others. What remained largely unsaid was the countless, nameless women who always pay the price, but receive neither compensation nor recognition from the state that represents them.