How does one approach an archive that is incomplete, erased or censored? Amidst the backdrop of militarised ambition, large-scale extractive infrastructural projects, erosion of landscapes and erasure of indigenous peoples, in a country borne out of rupture and fragmentation, Pakistani artist Omer Wasim’s practice reads the traces of these actions through unlikely witnesses – rocks, mythical spirits and botanical transplants from elsewhere.

Based in New Haven and Karachi, Wasim describes his work as intermedial; paintings, soundscapes, textual pieces, and installations often come together to create an immersive sensorial space in his practice. Even as it traverses a range of media, the central node of his work focuses on unearthing hidden and erased histories – intimate and geopolitical – of the landscapes he encounters.

Born in Karachi, he spent his early childhood in Islamabad and credits the vast green spaces of the city along with its temperament as having a subtle influence on his practice. It was Karachi, however, that became the backdrop for the friendships and collaborations that seeded the sparks of his interest in exploring how histories of violence, development and progress unfold within spatial landscapes.

“When I was growing up in Pakistan, there was a turning away of sorts to look elsewhere, to kind of adhere to an identity. The work that I made during undergrad was largely kind of nondescript. Over the years, I have begun to work towards turning where I come from and learning about my familial histories as well as bearing witness to what the state is erasing”, explains Wasim. He describes how his stint teaching at the Indus Valley School of Art introduced him to artists Saira Sheikh and Shahana Rajani, whom he collaborated with. With Sheikh, he began interrogating the dichotomy between different areas of Karachi and in his words, “zooming into what kind of constitutes the urban – who’s left out in the matrix of how cities are read and constructed.”

Increasingly, these inquiries led him towards thinking about the role of the artist in making details about complicity, labour and value in urban spaces accessible. “I think that we were really drawn to thinking about how we can complicate our relationship with the environment, with the urban and how we can think about what makes Karachi what it is.” Wasim describes observing a sanitation worker struggling to sweep up a patch of street on an elite, sea-facing street. With every sweep, the wind would deposit another layer of sand and the worker would engage in yet another Sisyphean battle against the elements to get rid of it — something about that moment brought the confluence of class power, the will to shape the natural environment and the deployment of marginalised bodies to do so into focus for Wasim.

Throughout our conversation, it is evident that Wasim is interested in how bearing witness to unheard voices and quiet moments such as these can fill in the gaps in narratives supplied by official histories and archives of how spaces are configured. With Sheikh, this interest manifested itself as photographic works and drawings that were excerpts and excavations from Karachi, capturing a series of ephemeral impressions from abandoned constructions and failed monuments to reading geological history and deep time through debris and rocks thrown up by the Arabian Sea.

This thread of examining how capital and the nation-state exert their power to shape land and sea at their whim continues in his collaborative work with Shahana Rajani under the name Saraab. Examining the extractive violence enacted by the Chinese-Pakistan Economic Corridor on indigenous communities and landscapes, their soundscape Safarnama invokes a displaced jinn – a creature from Islamic theology — as a witness (and a proxy voice) for the environmental degradation and displacement created by this large scale infrastructural project.

If these older works delved into the insidious forms of violence that permeate the landscapes of a rapidly and indiscriminately developing Pakistan, with his more recent work Wasim turns the lens inwards — drawing parallels between his personal history of displacement with others.

While in residence at Colomboscope in 2021, Wasim began to research the traces the Civil War in Sri Lanka had left on botanical species. In a missive created during the residency, he wrote, “Invisible but lurking, spectres were everywhere…In the ash-white deposits on the left where nothing grew or would grow…it was mentioned in passing that the ash-white deposits would have been a concoction of chemicals that they used to disappear and dissolve osseous remains…”

In the process of unearthing these spectres of war, Wasim began to reflect on the narrative silences that populated his family’s history. Rites Adrift, an exhibition from an institutional partnership between Shrine Empire and Khoj International Artists’ Association, curated by Anushka Rajendran and held at Khoj Studios, from August to September 2023, delved into his family’s journey, first from Patna and Bengal to what was then East Pakistan, followed by their exodus from East Pakistan to Karachi in the aftermath of the 1971 War. Within this turmoil and displacement, Wasim identified rituals and anchors that allow for metaphorical links between these fractured geographies. A twenty-one-foot-long bed of Dhaka grass, a fine soft-bladed grass found all over state-owned parks and buildings, is displayed in one of the studios at Khoj where it acts as a remnant of a shared history, a remembrance of geographical links that have since been severed. The grass is emblematic of Wasim’s links to Chittagong, a place he cannot visit or return to but where his ancestors are buried. In another work, a vitrine filled with images and recipes accompanied by a note detailing a ritual honouring ancestors and inviting their departed souls home for the celebration of Shab-e-Barat through burning incense in the hope that they may traverse these broken geographies in spirit. Amidst the state silence surrounding the horrors of 1971, along with the refusal of his family to give voice to the trauma of displacement, Wasim finds an entry point into these histories that is sensorial and embodied intergenerationally.

The works are transitory and the cumulative effect of experiencing them, along with the accompanying soundscapes of field recordings from Karachi and Colombo, situates the viewer within an immersive experience that charts out loss and lacunae in memory on a landscape that still silently remembers.

In conversation with STIR, Wasim spoke about how his upbringing across Karachi and Islamabad, his art education in the USA, and his family history of displacement have shaped his practice.