Groundtruthing is an ongoing research project that examines emerging landscapes at the intersection of infrastructure, war, and climate change in Pakistan. The exhibition draws on collective, interdisciplinary research and fieldwork conducted with the Karachi LaJamia (our long-term collaborative project), to make visible the social, economic, physical, and epistemic violence enacted by existing architectures of coloniality and capitalism upon landscapes and built environments. These neo-colonial transformations, influenced by transnational networks of power, finance, and capital, take place in spaces of constructed invisibility. We look at the ways in which war and development manifest in these invisible landscapes and are sustained through environmental violence. These sites are not just performances of power and destruction, but also sites of contention, resistance, adaptation, and survival. The exhibition explores and visualizes structures that facilitate and perpetuate occupation and erasure, alongside practices of living and building that respond to and/or resist these architectural interventions.

Zahra Malkani is an artist based in Karachi, Pakistan. She is a cofounder of the Karachi Art Anti-University and teaches in the Liberal Arts Program at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture.

Shahana Rajani is an artist and curator based in Karachi, Pakistan. She is a cofounder of the Karachi Art Anti-University and teaches in the Social Sciences Department at the Institute of Business Administration.