Zahra Malkani (PK, 1986)
Residency period: September-November 2025
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.
Malkani has exhibited and presented work internationally in venues such as HKW and SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, Mardin Bienali in Turkey, and Colomboscope, Sri Lanka. She has published writings on urbanism, militarization, and art in journals such as Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal. She has been awarded grants by the Graham Foundation for Art & Architecture, the Sharjah Art Foundation, and the Rockbund Art Museum. Malkani recently completed fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude and the Jan Van Eyck Academie. She is the co-founder with Shahana Rajani of Karachi LaJamia, an experimental project exploring radical pedagogies in relation to struggles around land and water in the city.
At La Becque, Zahra Malkani will develop a long-term sonic research project, Samandari Ehsaasat, with the aim of steering it in a new direction. After spending years gathering and expanding a sonic archive that documents the intersection of poetics, protest, and prayer and the convergence of sound, mysticism, and resistance in landscapes at the frontlines of the climate crisis across the deeply militarized aquatic regions of southern Pakistan, Malkani is now interested in exploring the exhibition and spatial possibilities of this archive. She plans to revisit these sounds in the aquatic context of La Becque and deepen her engagement with craft, materiality, form, and spatiality.
Zahra Malkani, photo Abdulisms