The conflict between India and Pakistan following the horrific April 2025 terror attack in Pahalgam in India-administered Jammu and Kashmir might have ended quickly, but there have still been long-term consequences. For example, India decided to suspend the bilateral Indus Waters Treaty that has been in place since 1960, resulting in even greater uncertainty regarding the future of water availability in Pakistan – a country that has witnessed some of the most far-reaching consequences of climate change.

Created in the months before and after this backdrop of conflict, of weaponisation of treaties and bureaucratic accords, and of the climate crisis, artist Shahana Rajani’s work on the city of her birth, Karachi, and the Indus Delta becomes all the more urgent and poignant. Her show at Para Site, In Drawing, In Remembrance, the first time her interdisciplinary works have been shown in Hong Kong, mixes a deep, poetic sensibility with the catastrophic, painful consequences faced by communities displaced by water scarcity. This has been brought about by the construction of dams, by the bureaucratic redrawing of maps and by the ways in which the Indus Delta has been swallowed by the inland advance of the Arabian Sea. The first creek of the delta is the Malir River, a seasonal channel in Karachi that used to provide water every monsoon – but is no longer viable and now runs dry.

Rajani’s approach to these changing river ecologies, ravaged by human actions, is not just that of an observer. She centres those most affected by the changes, showcasing their visual work, a collaborative approach that figures prominently in her show. The populations that inhabited these lands had been sustained for centuries by the delta, thanks to fishing and in the highly fertile soil around the Malir. Now, the land has been taken over by dams, sand-mining for real estate development, pollution and water-diversion, uprooting more than a million people.

The show is a complex, poetic, profound weaving together of all the different strands that compose this reality. It is made visible by drawings on the gallery walls that depict maps of how the river used to flow and through paintings by former fishermen, now relocated in precarious Karachi settlements. They draw murals that reproduce the boats, the riverine life and the food it provided, the religious shrines that had to be left behind and the small villages that dotted the landscape – a painterly practice performed as if to fix on the walls a memory of what was, and cannot be forgotten. A number of small wooden boats and portable paintings, distributed all around the gallery and collectively made by the communities in Karachi with whom Rajani engages, bring to Hong Kong’s Quarry Bay – itself built on land reclaimed from the waters – the memory of lives that paced themselves according to a vanished aquatic rhythm. The paintings, installed on a pink wall and small shelves, depict different types of fish, colourful boats and the bends of tributaries that mostly no longer exist.

Two new video works, Four Acts of Recovery (17min 36sec, 2025) and Lines That World A River (19min 29sec, 2025) document the lives and the approach to art and religion of the people with whom Rajani has spent time, aiming to document and understand what the experience of this loss feels like. In Four Acts of Recovery, we see a fisher family who have been displaced from the Indus Delta sitting on the ground in front of a white sheet of paper, as they remember and draw the lost map of their former homes. We see them reconstructing what was where as they discuss it among themselves – here the house, there the shrine, here the river, the boat, the fish it brought in.

The power of drawing, of mark-making, is not only an exercise in nostalgia and remembrance for Rajani’s camera but also part of a longer legacy of Islamic talismans covered in signs in Nastaliq, the Arabic calligraphic script, together with thaumaturgic dots and lines, a tradition carried out mostly by women. These are produced slowly, geometrically, with every mark applied following intricate rules that imbue the paper with the powers of divine protection – an act of ordering the chaos of our lives in the hope of shielding humans from decisions taken above our heads, over which we have no control. These talismans are called taweez and are meant to be inserted into pendants or bracelets, so as to be always in contact with the body and impart their protective qualities. In the video works, both the map and the talismans act as small resurrections of what used to be material and can now be only evoked through memory and the magic of talisman-making and painting.

The ecological urgency of addressing the political and administrative decisions taken in Karachi, or sometimes even further away, in New Delhi, becomes all the more evident in Lines That World A River. Rajani filmed it by following a group of local activists and community leaders who try to denounce how the Malir Expressway in Karachi has been built, riding roughshod over the land and its fragilities. Here, too, layers of infrastructural violence are uncovered through drawings of maps that reveal how much of the landscape has been sacrificed to the expressway, without entertaining less impactful possibilities but leaving behind rivulets of water that are no longer allowed to reach the sea. On the screen, metal plates are filled with sand, while a finger again traces Islamic talismanic signs, imprinting them in the sand following the curves and dots of Nastaliq, with symmetrical geometry. Even more than protection, these exercises seem to implore forgiveness from nature, like writing in the sand that none of this was the intention of the communities that once had adapted so symbiotically with their environment. That aspiration proved powerless in front of trucks, excavators and bureaucratic planning, not to mention water treaties suddenly pulverised by the decision to undo millennia of harmony among mountains, rivers and seas – and the populations that called them home.

A war against nature and ourselves is brought to the fore by Rajani in the softest colours of remembrance and possibility: the pink on the walls, the pale blues of the paintings, the orange and brown of the earth and of the henna on the women’s hands, the green transparency of the water and the small explosion of colour of the painted wooden boats, decorated with the love and care given to one’s most precious companions, as we powerlessly watch them disappear.

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印巴衝突源於2025年4月在印控查謨和克什米爾的帕哈爾加姆發生的駭人恐怖襲擊，雖然衝突很快結束，但後果卻延續至今。印度決定暫停1960年以來一直沿用的《印度河水協定》，令巴基斯坦未來的水資源供應更加充滿未知，而這個國家本身已經是全球氣候變化影響最為深遠的地區之一。

藝術家Shahana Rajani的作品，正是在衝突、條約被政治化，以及氣候危機這些背景之下的前後幾個月創作完成。她圍繞出生地卡拉奇與印度河三角洲展開的創作，在這個時候顯得格外迫切和令人沉痛。在Para Site的展覽「以畫為記」首次於香港展出她的跨領域作品，展覽以深沉而詩意的情感，直面那些流離失所的社群因水資源匱乏而承受的災難與沉痛後果。這些變化源於水壩建設、行政體系對地圖的重新劃定，以及阿拉伯海向內陸推進、逐漸吞噬印度河三角洲的過程。三角洲的第一條河道是馬里爾河，這條季節性河流位於卡拉奇，過去每逢季風都會帶來水源，河床如今卻已經乾涸。

Shahana Rajani不止是觀察這些因人類行為而被破壞的河流生態，而是將那些最受影響的人置於創作的中心，呈現他們的視覺創作，這種合作方式在展覽中佔據重要位置。曾經在這片土地上生活的人群數百年來依靠三角洲維生，以捕魚為業，也在馬里爾河周邊極為肥沃的土地上耕作。如今，水壩建設、為地產開發而進行的採砂、污染與水流改道等因素，使土地環境遭到徹底改變，迫使過百萬人離開家園。

整個展覽複雜、詩意而玄奧，將構成現實的多重線索交織在一起。畫廊牆上的繪畫呈現出河流昔日的流向與地圖，由被迫遷居至局勢不穩的卡拉奇定居點的昔日漁民繪畫。他們的壁畫重現船隻、河岸生活、食物、被迫遺下的宗教聖陵，以及散落於景觀中的小村落，這種繪畫實踐彷彿試圖將記憶固定於牆面，令那些曾經存在的事物不至於被遺忘。畫廊各處還散置著一些小型木船與可移動的畫作，這些作品由Shahana Rajani合作的卡拉奇社群共同創作，來到了本身也是填海而來的鰂魚涌，喚起一種曾經依循水域節奏而生活的時間感。安置在粉紅色牆面與小型層架上的畫作，描繪不同魚類、色彩鮮艷的船隻，以及如今大多已經消失的支流與河灣。

展覽兩部全新的錄像作品《復原的四步》（17分36秒，2025年）與《線條流淌，化為河流》（19分29秒，2025年）記錄了Shahana Rajani長期接觸的社群生活，以及他們對藝術與宗教的理解，試圖捕捉與了解這種失去家園與環境的經驗。在《復原的四步》中，一個被迫遷離印度河三角洲的漁民家庭在一張白紙前席地而坐，一邊回憶，一邊重繪舊日家園的地圖。他們互相討論、重構記憶，哪裡是房屋、聖陵、河流、船隻，以及水域帶來的魚獲。

在Shahana Rajani的鏡頭下，繪畫與標記製作的力量不單是一種懷舊或回憶的練習，也連結到悠久的伊斯蘭護身符傳統。那些護身符畫滿阿拉伯書法的波斯體，以及帶有神秘力量的點與線，多由女性承傳與實踐。這些護身符以緩慢和幾何的方式繪製，每一道筆劃都遵循精細的規則，令紙張承載神聖的守護力量。這個過程是試圖在現實的混亂中建立某種秩序，希望在面對那些由更高權力所作出、我們無從掌控的決策時，為自身築起一層保護。這些護身符稱為「taweez」，通常被放入吊墜或手鐲之中，透過長時間與身體接觸，傳遞保護的力量。在錄像作品中，地圖和護身符都像是小小的復活，那些曾經真實存在的事物，如今只能透過記憶、護身符與繪畫的魔法召喚。

在《線條流淌，化為河流》中，回應由卡拉奇，甚至更遙遠的新德里的政治與行政決策所衍生的生態危機的迫切性顯得更清晰。錄像中，Shahana Rajani跟隨一群地區行動者與長老，記錄他們對卡拉奇馬里爾高速公路建設的抗議，這條高速公路為所欲為地穿越土地與脆弱生態。地圖繪畫再次揭示了多重的基建暴力，大量土地因為高速公路而犧牲，溫和的可行方案不曾獲考慮。留下的只是一條條細小水道，無法再流向大海。畫面中，金屬盤填滿了沙，有一根手指在沙面上描繪伊斯蘭護身符的符號，以對稱的幾何形式按照波斯體的曲線與點繪畫。與其說是祈求保護，這些動作更像是在請求大自然寬恕。彷彿是在沙地上書寫，試圖訴說這一切並非曾與環境共生的社群所願。這種願望在貨車、挖土機與官僚規劃面前顯得毫無力量，更遑論某些決策甚至水資源條約瞬間瓦解，打破了山脈、河流與海洋，以及以此為家的人民之間延續數千年的和諧。

Shahana Rajani以最柔和的色彩，呈現一場對自然與自身的戰爭。牆上的粉紅色、畫中的淡藍色、土地和婦女手上Henna手繪的橙褐色、水的透明綠色，以及彩繪木船上綻放的色彩之中，那些被像珍貴同伴般細心裝飾的小船，最終仍只能在我們無力的目光下逐漸消失。