Height of Delight (Urdu) & Cookbook of Gestures (Lahore), Part of the Karachi Biennial 2024
The Tamasha Collective presents “The Glorious Hotel Treasures” at the 4thKarachi Biennial 2024
Challenges abound as we confront food sovereignty, climate catastrophe and environmental degradation on a local and global scale. The Tamasha Collectives’ The Glorious Hotel Treasures (GHT) installation re-members our connections to our regional food cultures. Food, as a starting point for our multisensory project, has the potential to re-ignite conversations about the food crisis in South Asia and enact policy changes to improve our rural and urban environmental crisis.
“Glorious Hotel Treasures” (GHT) employs an interactive, auditory, multisensory and transmedia installation at the historic Bagh Ibn Qasim near the Indian Ocean in Clifton, Karachi, Pakistan. We pull inspiration from three distinct manuscripts from the 16th Century to the present: the Ni’matnāma, Ulwan e Nemat, and Nuskha-e-Shah Jahani. Via ancient visuals and recipes, we amplify glorious cuisines that enriched cosmopolitan lives from the past, and persist today on the streets via vendors, in our homes and restaurants.
As you approach the installation, bedecked street vendors offer their delights and recipes while music and age-old calls to come taste the delights waft above. As you ascend the pavilion, you are met with a tent structure. Three sides amplify our African Arab Indian Ocean world connections and exchanges in the form of printed textiles. The textiles depict tamarind, imli, and bitter gourd, karela, both with origins on the African continent coupled with centuries of use in South Asia. On the fourth side, our visual interpretation from a Ni’matnāma miniature adorns the wall with life-size vessels: the actual tools that allow us to extract, meld and mix flavors. Enter the festooned tent and you are bathed with auditory descriptions of diverse foods while slow, mindful depictions of vessels and hands that create our cuisines dance on the screen. The oversized tools of the trade include crafted vessels, amidst a most beautiful setting of the Dai Anga in the Gulabhi Bagh in Lahore (Height of Delight). Another short film pays homage to embodied knowledge and the mind-hand that rhythmically makes naan, our daily bread (Cookbook of Gestures). In the hearth and womb, you engage with thoughtful films that amplify ancient culinary creations, in particular, the vessels and hands that create cultures, anew.
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