The Journey We Never Made

Naiza Khan’s The Journey We Never Made plays with an objective tourist vernacular through representing her long-term engagement with the small island of Manora, which sits in Karachi harbour. She has used her extensive collection of images and objects from the island to produce work that explores the relationships between landscape and history. For this project, local artisans were given scale drawings of vessels sourced from Khan’s photographic
archive, and images of historic vessels that have left their imprint on the Indian Ocean in their journeys of trade and conquest. They become both a personal touchstone and an expression of collective identity, acting as aids to memory and inhabiting stories that belong to the city as a whole.