and the trees sing resistance songs: Rah Naqvi

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. 

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. 

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.