Exhausted Geographies of Karachi: In Conversation with Abeera Kamran, Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani

Exhausted Geographies is a Karachi-based collaborative publishing practice by Abeera Kamran, Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani. Borrowing the terminology from the theorist Irit Rogoff, this project takes as its starting point a moment of exhaustion from representations of and discourses around a city whose histories and geographies have collapsed into clichés. Rather than offering the city as a single, fixed, knowable whole; this project is an assemblage of experimentations in ways of seeing, rendering, understanding and inhabiting the innumerable parallel realities of the city of Karachi. 

In this three-part conversation with the artists, we discuss the various dimensions of this project—delving into questions of affective research, the politics of documentary representation and map-making—in order to explore and produce new ways of seeing and imagining cities in the Global South. This conversation introduces the first volume of Exhausted Geographies, a collection of seven maps, each coupled with an essay, contributed by artists, architects, historians, urban planners, geographers and anthropologists working in or on Karachi.

_{(Featured Image: Exhausted Geographies, Vol. II. Karachi, 2017.)} 

Interview with Anisha Baid, 21 January 2021.

Click here to watch the second part.