Zahra Malkani (PK, 1986)
Residency period: September-November 2025
My residency at La Becque was a very creatively transformative and enchanted time for me. I worked on a series of translations of mystical poetry from an archive of field recordings. Simultaneously I developed a text on sonic historiography and archive anxiety.
All of this went into the completion of the first part of ‘Noorani Echo Sound (Echoes that radiate divine light)’ – a set of tapes that attempt a sonic historiography of a river. ‘Noorani Echo Sound’ is an invitation to sense the divine light of an unrelenting river in the hiss and clip of the metal and rust that coats magnetic film, in the poetic possibilities of liner notes and the poetic impossibility of a tracklist, in the sweet troubles of translation and the sweet labour of dubbing. — Zahra Malkani
Based in The Hague, Zahra Malkani is a multidisciplinary artist from Karachi, Pakistan. Collaboration, research, and pedagogy are at the heart of her practice, exploring sound, dissent, and devotion against militarism and infrastructural violence. Working across multiple media – including text, video, and sound – she examines the politics of development, displacement, and dispossession through the lens of dissident ecological knowledge and traditions of environmental resistance.
Zahra Malkani, La Becque, 2025, photo Matthieu Croizier (1-2) and Aurélien Haslebacher (3-5)