The politics of sustenance: Monika Emmanuelle Kazi and Paloma Ayala at Karachi Biennale 2024

The Karachi Biennale 2024, with its overarching theme of „Risk/Rizq“ this year, sought to explore the intersections between risk and the Urdu word for sustenance, provision, and livelihood, rizq. This duality prompted conversations around how global systems of power, economic inequalities, and ecological degradation influence access to resources. A salient theme of food politics also emerged in the works of Monika Emmanuelle Kazi and Paloma Ayala, whose respective performance and installation drew on personal and collective histories to explore the themes of sustenance and survival.

Monika and Paloma, your works are deeply tied to concepts of domestic spaces, memory, and ecological issues. How do you each approach these themes, and what specific messages did you hope to convey through your installations at the Karachi Biennale?

Monika Emmanuelle Kazi:
My work draws heavily on my family archives. I’m interested in these memories as part of a form of bodily archiving that unfolds in everyday life. I think that, coming from the African diaspora, I’m trying to fill the gap or erasure created by the great History we’ve learned, by using the term monoculture, in all its ways. In presenting my installation-performance at the Karachi Biennale, as well as responding to the theme of the year 2024, I wanted to see what links this monoculture had created, outside the West, with countries whose histories were partly subject to the colonisation of the domestic.

This milk powder is the milk I drank as a child in Congo-Brazzaville, and it happens to be sold all over the world, except in the West. This transformed food, reduced to powder, regains its function on contact with hot water. It shows how the so-called countries of the North interfere with others using these simple products. For me, coming from the Congo, just like the people living in Pakistan, this product is rather banal and common, but its importation says a lot about the global relations in which we still live.

Paloma Ayala:
My work delves into my own family’s history as agricultural workers on the east border of Mexico in the United States, a history that is intrinsically related to economical, ecological, and also emotional aspects of human life. So memory, domestic, and ecological spaces are quite present topics, yes. I aim to problematize agricultural work as a place of production of basic resources such as food done by people with knowledge and faces, as a set of human practices developed by these people positioning themselves directly in relation with the surrounding ecological conditions, and as an ancient economical activity that is the source of a diversity of knowledge. I want to talk about these things in a way that strengthens the presence of the generations of border human lives that made it through the neo-liberal and post-colonial connections to the US.

Paloma, your video work “Que no me quiten ni la lengua ni las patas” reflects on the agricultural struggles of your family in Mexico and draws connections with issues faced by Pakistani farmers. How do you see these local struggles speaking to global audiences, and what impact do you hope or saw this had on viewers in Karachi?

Paloma Ayala:
“Que no me quiten ni la lengua ni las patas” (translated as „Take anything but our tongues and feet“) shows a space taken care of by older people, an environment that is about to radically change due to the growth of the city and the damages done to the soil due to the practice of planting patented seeds in vast monocultures, seeds that belong to European and US agro-industries and that are harvested and sold to the same industries. The international agreements in North America have favoured transnational industry coming from the so-called economic powers for a couple of centuries already, including the US, Germany, Switzerland, and more recently Korea, Japan, and China. This is very linked to our colonial history and the creation of the actual border.

What I have encountered throughout visits and projects made in other agricultural regions, like Bolivia, Bangladesh, and India, is that the story of unequal economic power reproduces. Bigger economic powers have a presence in places where resources are extracted and misused, where the local economies cannot compete and are impeded by their own national governments to gather knowledge to protect their land. We are degrading our soil to feed consumerism in Europe and the US, and there is little knowledge and energy to build up a different system. Is this the future envisioned by colonial economies?

Both of your works seem to explore the impact of political and economic powers on personal and cultural identities. How do you balance your personal narratives with the larger socio-political themes your art addresses?

Monika Emmanuelle Kazi:
It’s a dialogue, a constant back and forth. Starting from the global to understand the personal, from the macro to the micro, and vice versa. What interests me about these paths are the connections, the links that emerge.

Paloma Ayala:
I try to stay very close to home, close to my own story and the stories of the places and beings that I love and portray in any of the works I do. I am very careful of how I use images of my own uncles, aunts, my dad, or grandparents. I love them. I feel a huge wish to protect them. I think that distance is important in order to both create links of solidarity and to create artworks that make sense in a non-extractive way. I say that as someone who has migrated to Switzerland and is creating projects with Swiss financial support. That is already problematic in itself, and I am in the process of re-articulating myself under this understanding. A balance of self-criticism, community criticism, and re-learning is essential.

What has been your experience exhibiting in Karachi, especially in terms of audience reactions and cultural dialogue? How has the local context influenced your approach or perspective on your work?

Monika Emmanuelle Kazi:
It was very rewarding for me on every level. I think the public really appreciated the activation of the installation, and many were touched by the presence of the milk powder. Whereas in Europe, the critical aspect of this product is more emphasised, here the memory, childhood, and everyday aspects were stronger. This was very touching for me because, despite its negative aspect, this product also contains a lot of fond memories. That’s the ambivalence of growing up with something that’s not so good for you.

The local context has enabled me to broaden the ways in which my work can be seen, to increase the prisms of vision.

Paloma Ayala:
One of my favourite works in the Karachi Biennale 24 is „The Table,“ created by Fatima Majeed, Fazal Rizvi, Ahmer Naqvi, Luluwa Lokhandwala, and Shabbir Mohammed. It basically opened a table as a space for interaction and dialogue about and with the disappearing fisherfolk communities of the delta of the Indus, in what is now Karachi. This work to me was very inspiring. Not only did I learn about local issues, but I met actual people going through those issues. I tasted their rice, listened to their points of view, and hoped that these issues are not only divulged as an artwork but as something that belongs to everyone in the city.

I think I lost trust and respect in the art world and how it could mediate materialities, visualities, and urgent social issues. „The Table“ reminded me that some artworks have a mediating capacity that can be clear, emotional, and critical at the same time.