Footnotes

Provenance
Property from the artist's collection.

"I can't say I have a set process. One medium informs the other...It's a lot of bouncing between mediums.''

Born in New York, Ayesha Kamal Khan's work serves as a reflective interplay between tangible and intangible facets of the spaces we inhabit. It enhances the intricate layers of 'placehood', its infinite arrangements, and its incapacity for translation. Based between New York and Islamabad, Pakistan, Khan is a recent fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program 2022-23. She completed her BFA from the National College of Arts, Pakistan in 2011 and an MFA from Pratt Institute in 2015. Her work has been exhibited internationally including Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, the Cuadro Gallery in Dubai, and the Queens Museum in New York. She also presently teaches at the New York Academy of Art and Pratt Institute.

For the auction, she presents a 'placeholder (sleeping dragon), N 33° 40' 58.1063", E 72° 59' 29.5449' from a series integral to her practice. 'Placeholders' is a body of work that acknowledges its temporary nature, hinting at its role as a stand-in for something larger. It analyses the significance of empty spaces and deliberate cropping, accentuating the absence of information when gathering materials or images from a specific local context. Khan focuses on extracting elements from photographs taken in her home city in Pakistan, delving into the urban landscape's transformation and examining the challenges of accurately translating it. "This body of work is developed by cutting out photographs (digitally and by hand) zooming into parts of the photograph that remove some information of the location while zooming into others." This exploration aims to emphasise the limitations of visual translation while advocating for an expanded vocabulary in expressing the essence of a place.

Khan's practice came about through oodles of play between diverse mediums, reading, writing through ideas, and conversations with close and curious friends and family. Rather than adhering to a fixed process, she asserts meaning across a web of mediums while roping them together into a body of work. "I can't say I have a set process. One medium informs the other. I've always had an integrative approach that has a few components bringing together a body of work. I make a lot of diagrams, venn diagrams, graphs, and drawings where I am able to understand my work branching off to some other medium and then coming back to the text. It's a lot of bouncing between mediums," she says.

She is particularly inspired by the language of local materials, the conversations and arrangements that materials have embedded in the logic of a particular placehood. "In my case, it happens to be the streets where I grew up and the urban and domestic landscape." Integral facets of her work toy with the specifics of place-holders and the futile attempts of visuals and objects to capture the depth and breadth of a place—often by using the language of provisional structures that highlight their inherent impermanence. "It questions the portability of placehood and the mechanisms of language that carry the load of reduction and exaggeration all at once." Oscillating between toy-scale creations providing glimpses into a shifting reality, and large-scale installations immersing viewers in a precarious spatial experience, her work embodies transient solutions asserting their claim to land. "The work speaks to the burden of carrying a sense of belonging and the innate hunger to unearth it."

In 2022, the Whitney Independent Study Program provided Khan with a space for collective learning and intense discussions. "We met twice a week with some assigned readings that we would discuss as a group. I was extremely lucky to see so many amazing scholars and artists present their works in an intimate setting. Most importantly, I found a great community in the cohort that really pushed the material at hand." Collaborations, with her collective titled 'second practice', have also been a source of profound fulfilment as a visual artist.

Khan's work prompts viewers with intriguing and compelling inquiries. "What if the most accurate reading of a place is in an active attempt to look for a reasonable distance to read from? As soon as it is exacted, it has defeated its purpose. The work is constantly shifting the measure of distance to read from. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak speaks of Translation as the most intimate act of reading. I seek this intimacy in my work with absolute consciousness of these micro translations," the artist says, acknowledging her role as a translator. "Looking for the nucleus that Walter Benjamin speaks of, I hope to find a visual language that preserves the specificity of local materials," she concludes.

Shreya Ajmani, a writer who explores the global impact of art from South Asia and its diaspora, has written this text for Bonhams.