PRESENTATION: House of Kal

In many South Asian languages, including Hindi, Urdu and Bangla, the word “kal” means both yesterday and tomorrow. The community architecture and polyphonic co-Habitat “House of Kal” combines an exhibition, a radio station, music, film, performance and workshop programs, zines and publications. The artistic and activist positions interconnect modes of survival and reimagination that emerge from water bound ecologies around the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the northern Atlantic and the River Spree. Together they propose an anti-map of ecologies of practice invested in collectivity, resistance, worldbuilding and imperfect solidarities, with a focus on queer, migrant and decolonial relationships between the Global North and South across time and space.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: nGbK Archive

“House of Kal” at nGbK is part of the transoceanic platform a language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word. Kal (kal). Founded in 2020 by a group of artists and activists, kal is a nomadic place for listening, music and movement, for practicing vocabularies at the crossings of art, anti-colonial feminisms and eco-politics that articulate radically different ways of being alive together in entangled futures, pasts and presents. The name of the platform is inspired by a line in Fatimah Asghar’s poem Kal and extends the invocation of this word, shifting its meaning based on who speaks, from where and when. Expressing a time beyond the here and now, the meaning of kal moves fluidly between bodies, territories, histories and futures along the movement of tongues. From 2020 to 2022 kal unfolded as queer houses for art and community making in Karachi, Colombo and Berlin, as well as online DIY radio programs, workshops and collective publications, performance, music and video productions. In 2022, fragments of the growing archive of kal were exhibited in Philadelphia. This community was fostered alongside deep ruptures and dissonances through pandemic time, continuing economic, political and social crises in both South Asia and in Europe, border regimes, ongoing wars, as well as ecological dis-asters. Through this time, kal has become a collective organism that dreams other worlds into reality and breathes the capacity of living and thriving in difficult circumstances. Zahabia Khozema’s body of works focuses on the Gujjar Nullah and the Kausar Niazi colony in Karachi. The Gujjar Nullah is a 22 kilometer sewage and drainage stream in the city, around which working class communities live. After heavy rains in the 2020 monsoon flooded large parts of the city of Karachi including this neighborhood, the city government received funding and support from the World Bank to work on drainage and flood relief systems. As a result, communities living on the riverbanks received eviction notices despite having lived there for 60 years and having been recognized as legal occu-pants of this land. Vicky Shahjehan collaborates with residents of the Kompanna Veediya neighborhood in the center of Colombo, Sri Lanka, also known as “Slave Island”. Shahjehan’s practice, as well as her long-term research on migration and displacement in multi-ethnic Slave Island, is rooted in her own and her grandmother’s life and existence in the community. Through her work, Shahjehan has been creating testimonies of the histories of the diverse people living there, their unitedness despite class, race and gender oppression as well as the rapid changes due to gentrification that she has witnessed affecting the life in Slave Island socially and economically.

The activist group Women in Exile, an initiative founded by and fighting for the rights of refugee women* in Germany, in collaboration with the House of Kal, have created fragments of an archive that display three manifestations of their history of protest on water. These fragments capture them resisting borders and restrictions on movement, all a part of their anti-racist and anti-fascist work. The 2014 “Refugee Women Tour on Rafts” traveled on rivers through Germany on self-built rafts for seven weeks to connect with refugee women* in different lagers* and deportation centers. During a 2018 protest against an AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, a German far right political party )demonstration in the heart of Berlin, the group led the resistance from a raft on the River Spree, together with other anti-fascist boats and vessels. This history of protest on water is empowering in the wake of the continued crisis in the Mediterranean Sea, where refugee boats are forced to capsize, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of migrating people. In an attempt to remember histories of protest, the exhibition explores and celebrates the work of Women in Exile as an example of collective resistance. The photographic archives of the collective are activated alongside texts sharing their experiences of working, resisting, and protesting on water. Through them, as well as a screening of their 2017 film “Women Breaking Borders—15 Years of Women in Exile”, these specific moments of protest serve to recontextualise and reimagine migrant bodies in connection to bodies of water.  In resistance to mainstream technology and ideology, which morbidly ferry us towards a bleak destiny, The Many Headed Hydra (TMHH) offers oracles and embodiments of radically different futures. In a many voiced temporary collectivity created by decolonial dreaming and transoceanic affinities, TMHH connects textile, video, zine and print works with contributions by artists Zahra Malkani, Pia Arke and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and the deep time presence of three petrified shells. Collective offerings by sixteen individuals bring together the shared ecology of care and practice generated by kal since 2020—from Colombo, Karachi, Berlin, Jeetze, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Zurich, to elsewheres. Ranging from sound and music to reading materials, poetry, video, recipes and works in progress, the offerings meditate on collective forms of thriving in survival, mourning, love, community, transition, migration and kin-making. Plotted throughout the installation as a constellation, they become metaphors for stars and function as individual khNutisan homage to a community that has been fostered through cooking, making, studying and supporting each other through a pandemic, climate disasters, economic collapses, and the political violence of the state. Collectively, these offerings tell the story of the complex and important ways in which the relationships of kal have been generated through friendships, from 2019 until now. We consider these as nodes that sustain us on our journeys and make our existence possible in the pasts that were, the presents that are and the futures that will be.

Participating Artists: Anandita Bajpai, Archive Books, Aziza Ahmad, Bino Byansi Byakuleka, Radio Kal, Radio Wearebornfree!, Rohini Devasher, Rongili Biswas, Sakina Aliakbar, Sarnt Utamachote, Spaceship Beben (Promona Sengupta, Adriana Disman, Jorinde Schulz, Sumona Dhakal, Asmara Tensil), The Many Headed Hydra collective (Aziz Sohail, Bryndís Björnsdottír, Emma Wolf-Haugh, Suza Husse & Alizeh Ayesha, Ayesha Chaudhry, Khalida Hussain, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Ni6369 Shell samples, Paloma Ayala, Pia Arke, Sabeen Omar, Vasi Samudra Devi, Veenadari Lakshika, Zahra Malkani a.o.), Vicky Shahjehan, Venuri Perera, Women in Exile, Zahabia Khozema & kal community offerings by Aio Frei, Arshia Fatima Haq, Chathuri Nissansala, Franck-Lee Alli-Tis, Hema Shironi Joseph, Lucas Odahara, Sehan Khanna, Sophia-Layla Afsar, Tehreem Mela, Yvonne Wilhelm/knowbotiq, Vera Ryser, Zubaan Books a.o.

Photo: Artists of House of Kal Karachi at a workshop with Karachi LaJamia (Karachi Anti-University), 2021. Image courtesy Fiza Khatri

Info: Work group: Aziza Ahmad, Promona Sengupta and The Many Headed Hydra (Aziz Sohail, Suza Husse, Emma Wolf-Haugh), nGbK am Alex, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 11/13, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 14/9-12/11/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sat-Sun 12:00-18:00, Fri 12:00-20:00, https://ngbk.de/en/