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TARQ is delighted to present and the trees sing resistance songs by Rah Naqvi (he/they). Spanning painting, installation, textile, and film, the exhibition brings together Naqvi's most recent body of work — one that threads through grief, faith, lamentation, and resistance, and offers an encounter with material as a site of discovery, memory, and time.
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Rah Naqvi, land as memory, body as trace, 2025 (Detail)
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At the heart of their works in this show is a sustained and intimate engagement with soil. Naqvi has spent the past year collecting earth from their mother's garden, returning to it on each visit home, developing pigments, and tracing what they call the "histories of dirt". For Naqvi, soil is a speculative archive: a repository of what has been buried, forgotten, or silenced, and yet also a map of what persists. Alongside this, they work with soil from sites of conflict and worship, wood ash, copper filings, broken brick, rubble, and rusted nails. These are not merely materials but testimonies. This sustained proximity to the natural world has drawn Naqvi back, repeatedly, to the body. The human form appears in the work in increasingly literal terms, the body itself becoming a site through which histories of violence, faith, and survival are held and expressed.
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Rah Naqvi, anti capitalist guide to safety from thoughts on death, 2026 (Detail)
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The exhibition is organized around two planes of existence — above ground and below — that together constitute a metaphorical home, a space of safety and shelter built from the tension between them. Below the surface lies an archive of grief and prayer: the act of kneeling and pressing one's forehead to the earth in supplication, the burial of the dead, the bricks of crumbling buildings raining down into rubble. Above, there is the blanket spread across the earth — a body lying upon it, looking up at the open sky. Between these two planes, soil operates as both boundary and threshold: a site of movement and transformation, where decay and growth exist not in opposition but as the twin foundations of one another.
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Rah Naqvi, what is prayer, if not a griever's archive, 2025
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The exhibition's title comes from a film of the same name, in which lamentation is observed on the beating trunks of aged trees. A site of violence is transformed into a site of preservation; its soil, in Naqvi's reckoning, can never be unburdened by the knowledge of what it has witnessed. This gesture — of mourning as archive, and grief as resistance — runs through the entirety of the show. Drawing on their faith, Naqvi reflects on khak-e-shifa as a vessel of memory and a reminder of sacrifice. If grief is the essence of faith, they ask, then its repetition in the face of ongoing atrocity makes mourning itself a living archive.
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Rah Naqvi, khwabgah, 2026
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Naqvi writes: "I've been watching those who endure, turn to prayer, where the act of faith in the face of despair becomes a resistance profound, an attempt to understand, and comprehend prolonged injustice. I am tracing lines between blood and soil — land that bears witness, trees that sing resistance songs."
The exhibition ultimately asks what endures: not supremacy or conquest, but the richness of those who nurtured, made, and resisted — held, always, in the soil.
and the trees sing resistance songs: Rah Naqvi
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