
Shahana Rajani is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work engages with the visualities and infrastructures of development, militarisation and the climate crisis. Community-based and collaborative approaches to research are central to her practice. She is the co-founder of Karachi LaJamia, an experimental pedagogical project founded with Zahra Malkani in 2015.
Films shown in Divvy Film Festival London 2024
A cipher for the missing explores the Baloch practice of massad whereby the date palm tree is invoked to help locate the missing. In this practice, dating back to Bibi Fatima, and passed down generationally by women, the tree grants access to knowledge of the unseen – past, present, future and all things hidden. At a time when the military-state seeks to render all beings visible through surveillant technologies, while disappearing those it deems threatening, massad emerges as a queer practice of recovery that centers alternate forms of relationality, connection and intimacy in a more-than-human world. A cipher made of leaves that renders the military’s disappearance tactics legible to the very communities that bear the brunt of its violence.
The date palm also features as the main emblem of the paramilitary, worn on uniforms and painted on watchtowers and walls across Karachi. In exploring the tensions between the appropriation of this tree as a symbol of military power, and the tree’s material participation in native cosmologies, the work asks what it means for plants and people to belong together to a place, questioning the vigilantly patrolled boundaries that construe humans as separate from the rest of the world.
A Cipher for the Missing
Dir: Shahana Rajani
Run time: 7 mins 5 secs.
Production year: 2022
Language: Urdu (with English subtitles)
Country: Pakistan
Docu/fiction short