Polyphonic Solidarities: a review of ‘Gathering Grounds’
- The Aleph Review
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Hassan Tahir Latif
Gathering Grounds (Ijtimai Buniadain) was a contemporary art exhibition held at Olomopolo (Lahore), as part of the Simurgh International Festival of Film and Arts 2025; curated by Abdullah Qureshi.
In his trailblazing book, Landmarks, writer and environmentalist Robert Macfarlane writes about the ‘Bastard Countryside’—the spaces between the rural and urban where the boundaries are blurred (inspired by Victor Hugo’s terrain vague or the ‘debatable realm’). It is a place where two different natures collide. Weeds encroach upon motorways; animals find refuge in discarded ‘urban’ items, such as tyres; organised human life, the edge of residential communities with their boundary walls, continues to push outwards, desperately needing to expand.
The ‘bastard countryside’ is a constant site of negotiation where the natural and material world confront and acknowledge each other, while finding ways to co-exist. The liminal spaces that many are fond of talking about in their artist statements find corporeal form in these areas: a neither-rural-nor-urban ecosystem, a transitional space in a constant tug-of-war. What arises out of this is a unique understanding of the limits of co-existence and, more importantly, protest. Protest by the natural world that has always been here against the continually expanding oppression of the built world.
These sites of negotiations, these ‘margin landscapes’, also extend to the more existential aspects of our world. Gathering Grounds, curated by Abdullah Qureshi, was the presentation of one such site where ‘artistic practices and strategies can be mobilised to think about bodies, communities and spaces of difference from transnational feminist and queer positionalities’.
Qureshi’s bastard countryside took form from Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) foundational concept of borderlands—‘contested, in-between spaces where identities blur, resist, and reform’. The contemporary exhibition was an exploration of how borders morph into ‘dynamic and porous ground for gathering, protesting and staging individual and collective refusals’. Held to accompany the Simurgh International Festival of Film and Arts 2025, Gathering Grounds brought together ten artists whose work offered compelling narratives around ideas of gender, sexuality, desire, as well as race, migration and ecology. Spread over two floors, the exhibition not only presented artists in dialogue with each other, but also engaged the physical space in this exercise by allowing ideas to flow seamlessly from room to room, corner to corner.
This is where Qureshi’s intelligent, considered curation came into play; video installations, canvases, sculptural pieces, works on paper—all coherently expounded upon ideas of solidarities across personal and political (and personal political) concerns.
Concerns such as the body—especially queer and women’s bodies—as a site of negotiation and contention showed up across the presented works: Shah Numair Abbasi’s remembrance of Pakistani actress Rani was imbued with an inherent queer campiness that underscored the homoeroticism in Nad E Ali’s photographs of wrestlers and empty, abandoned places that often serve as sites of queer desires in action. Fatima Faisal Qureshi, on the other hand, examined the interiority of queer lives and desires, her works exuded a tangible quality of longing and desire. These find parallels in Amra Khan’s signature altar pieces that challenge ideas of hetero-normative desirability and beauty in interior spaces, using painted queer bodies as a central motif. There’s an almost sense of the sacred in her practice, which always stops me in my tracks.
Natasha Malik’s works—a video, a painting and drawings—furthered the conversation around bodies as sacred spaces, but provided a different, more critical view of the dichotomy of women’s bodies as sites of veneration and objects of lust. Violence against women is easily associated with lustful control, but Natasha’s work makes one think about the violence and control over women’s bodies that arises out of worship in a hetero-patriarchal context. Huda Saeed’s provided a way out of this bind through feminist interpretations of mythical femme and queer bodies that stand as counterpoints to normative views of women’s bodies and masculinity.
The narrative around ‘othered bodies’ continued with Sophia-Layla Afsar’s short film presenting a more pressing concern surrounding queer bodies—the erasure of them via anti-trans narratives in the media.
Our precarious relationship with the natural world also echoed across the exhibition: whether overtly through Veera Rustomji’s videos that recorded her performance art (focusing on the tenuous lives of marine creatures in the polluted Arabian Sea), or more subtly through the ecological tension in Fatima Faisal Qureshi’s ‘Cry Me A Ravi’ that depicted two men in what appeared to be taut post-coital intimacy, but surrounded by rising water (all the more powerful after yet another destructive monsoon season). Situated next to this, Nad E Ali’s photographs of the detritus of our urban lives—plastic bags full of flowers and discarded bottles—became stark reminders of the tensions in these ‘borderlands’.
These tensions persisted in Sharlene Bamboat’s two-screen video sound-and-video installation that emphasised the polyphonic solidarities amidst genocides and other violences, such as climate change and Eco-fascism.
What this contemporary exhibition successfully demonstrated was the intricate interlinkages between the most pressing issues of our times: climate disaster, genocide, fascism, bodily and sexual autonomies. It underscored the point that activists have been fervently making since the Gaza genocide began: none of us are free till we are all free. The show also highlighted that when the world heads towards disasters, manmade or environmental, minorities—women, queer and others—are the ones that bear the brunt of this violence.
Perhaps nowhere was this more pronounced than Mariam Magsi’s piece: a thin layer of fabric hung delicately on the balcony, with photographs printed on it; a woman in a burqa walks into the sea, her gossamer ghost staring at us, swaying gently in the wind, admonishing us to not forget. This was one of the most haunting artworks and has stayed with me ever since.
Forgetting, then, becomes another concern; and memory as a site of resistance against erasure.
In an essay titled ‘Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness’, bell hooks states “our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting”. She urges us to find alternative ways of articulation, to cultivate community and to identify spaces where a process of revision can begin, paving the way for resistance. She chooses the margin as a space of radical openness, a place that is part of the whole, but outside of its main body. It is not the margin created out of oppressive systems, but one of her choosing; still it is not a ‘safe’ place. It is actively under threat and requires a community to sustain it.
Gathering Grounds expertly shows us how margins can range from the geographical (‘bastard countrysides’, queer cruising grounds, endangered coastlines) and physical (bodies), to the spiritual and intangible (desire, ideology, memory). It is in these spaces that we can find fertile ground to ‘resist and reform’ and create new ways of being—a task that is becoming increasingly urgent every day.