Saba Khan: Eyes Were Rendered Useless in the Muddy Dark Waters

suite's inaugural project presents Saba Khan’s solo exhibition, “Eyes Were Rendered Useless in the Muddy Dark Waters.”

Working between London and Lahore, Saba Khan is an artist and educator—and, like suite, a self-organizing practitioner. Her practice centers on the politics, histories, and cultures of water: from infrastructures that obstruct its flow, to lives that migrate along rivers, to myths and local knowledge concerned with restoring water sources. She examines how rivers are shaped by human and more-than-human forces, and in turn how they shape life and habitats.

In 2019, Khan founded the Pak Khawateen Painting Club (Pure/Pakistani Women’s Painting Club). A group of women artists, dressed in outfits modeled after the uniforms designed by Pierre Cardin for Pakistan International Airlines flight attendants in the 1960s, conducted plein-air field studies along the Indus River within Pakistan. By “infiltrating” sites of hydropower production conceived and built by male bureaucrats, they interrogated issues of population displacement and ecological ethics, while—through pointed irony—subverting social expectations of women’s compliance and propriety.

The exhibition presents three groups of video works created over the past six years, alongside working archives and hand-inlaid pieces, as well as a selection of newly produced paintings and works on paper. This marks the first presentation of Saba Khan’s practice in China.