These Silences Are All the Words

Madiha Aijaz (b. 1981, Karachi, Pakistan; d. 2019, Karachi)
"These Silences Are All The Words" 2018
4K digital film, 15:00 min.
Collection of the artist

Madiha Aijaz’s video These Silences Are All The Words explores the locations of three neglected libraries in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. In careful, slow, and nuanced ways, Aijaz investigates the politics of language and culture, the production and dissemination of knowledge, and the simultaneous militarization, surveillance and repression of these sites. Aijaz reflects on the changing and increasingly divisive landscape of Karachi by activating these alternative spaces and archives of cultural debris, which refuse and resist the state’s manipulation of time, history and language. She makes us aware of the hidden rhythms, affective histories, and intimate relationships of being and belonging that do not follow official dictates. While governments and military-states alike have used the pandemic to silence dissent and tighten their grip on cultural spheres, Aijaz’s video returns us to the slower, durational forms of violence that have marginalized alternative spaces of radical knowledge production in the city in the decades leading up to our present moment. Through a focus on these sites and accompanying practices of bodily inhabitance, Aijaz traces the continuities, slippages, and tensions among past, present, and future.

By Shahana Rajani (based in Karachi)