There’s something quietly unsettling about the central object in Zahra Malkani’s installation at this year’s Busan Biennale in Korea. It’s a jhoola — the kind of hanging swing found in homes across Pakistan, usually a fixture of leisure, childhood, long afternoons doing nothing in particular. Except this one isn’t wood or wrought iron. It’s welded from scrap metal pulled off a ship-breaking yard in Karachi, and sitting on it means holding two contradictory histories in your body at once: the swing as a site of rest and play, and the swing as a relic of the brutal, often deadly labor economy that dismantles ships along Pakistan’s coast.
The piece is called The Wanderers Taught Me Longing, The Mystics Taught Me Lament, and the swing isn’t the whole work — it’s the seat you’re meant to occupy while watching (and, Malkani insists, listening to) a 20-minute film built from her years of research into the Indus Delta. That film doesn’t behave like a documentary. It’s closer to a woven mass of sound: voices telling stories, lullabies half-remembered, devotional songs, testimony that trails off before it resolves into anything conclusive. Loss and folklore run through it, but nothing arrives cleanly. Everything bleeds into everything else.
That refusal to tidy things up isn’t incidental — it’s the whole point. Malkani has said she deliberately works against the instinct to archive or preserve sound, because preservation, in her view, does violence of its own. It freezes something that was never meant to hold still. “A clean, contained song, or a track, is a colonial invention,” she’s explained. In her recordings, nothing has a tidy beginning or end — a conversation slides into a song, the song opens into a prayer, the prayer breaks apart into laughter, and a crying baby or a cow mooing or two aunties talking over each other aren’t noise interrupting the work. They’re the work. That’s the chorus she’s actually interested in — not voices singing in unison, but voices allowed to remain distinct while still, somehow, sounding like they belong together.
It’s a fitting approach for an artist whose practice keeps returning to the Indus Delta and to landscapes that complicate tidy ideas of nationhood and belonging. Busan Biennale 2026, titled Dissident Chorus, runs through November 1 — and Malkani’s installation is a strong argument for why that title fits.
