Yaminay Chaudhri Works Through The Nothing

Artist Yaminay Chaudhri remembers a time when she could walk up to the first wave in her hometown’s beach and see a fish. Today, those days seem long gone.

Over the last two decades, Chaudhri has seen what surging global interest and capital investments have done to Seaview, the public beach in her hometown of Karachi, Pakistan. Her latest response is in the form of a short film titled There Was Nothing – Kuch bhi Naheen Tha! The film is on view at Artspace New Haven through April 27.

The film follows the conversation of two men. They speak briefly about marriage, work and money, as iridescent lights on motorized buggies spin in and out of frame. They pass by vendors, crowds of people, some of which dance to the music of blaring flutes, drums and tambourines.

There is this dominating image of a ship, which used to be a restaurant but is now part of an amusement park named the Chunky Monkey. The film is a snapshot of Karachi. It is nostalgic and hazy. It is development, not from a bird’s eye view but from a beachside view.

After showing her film to a few dozen New Haveners at Artspace last Thursday, Chaudhri began discussing her work over the last couple of decades. She explained that she was interested in documenting “the texture of the city” as both an individual artist and the Tentative Collective, which she founded with a group of friends, housewives, chauffeurs, activists and lawyers in 2011.

“With the collective, the idea was when the infrastructure of the city breaks down it leads to an opportunity to do something and to sort of make your presence felt,” she said.

Since 2011, the collective has documented the city through several film projects, showing its work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Manchester Art Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art-Los Angeles and most recently Artspace among others.

Thinking about city, structures and space comes naturally to Chaudhri, who worked as an architect for several years. What seemed unnatural to her was the rate at which the beach had been disappearing.

Karachi is a growing city of around 15 million people, with “aspirations” to be a tourist city like Singapore or Dubai, according to Chaudhri. But in the wake of its development, Chaudhri said the beach has suffered pollution and oil spills. It has been gentrified through its privatization, displacing people like the vendors whose livelihood depend on the area. She said that citizens currently only have access to about three of the eight miles of seafront, and that the rest is inaccessible.

It’s a loss that is palpable through her work. In the film, one of the men who is about to be displaced notes: “To gain something, one must lose something else.”

Indeed Chaudhri’s video, as well as her years of work, begs viewers to ask: What is there to gain? At what expense? Are we all complicit? There’s an obvious call to action, to preserve, to expose. Her films move slowly, exploring the changes in architecture through documenting personal narratives, blueprints and maps.

They explore cultural and aspirational shifts in the way people have changed their homes, analyzing the original architects’ initial aesthetics to decipher what that meant for Karachi’s image then, and where Karachi is going now.

She uses this concept of low-resolution as a tool to resist against the flow of capitalism, or at least slow it down. It is a concept used in architecture and digital contemporary art to be an alternative to the favored high-resolution, which provides polished and accessible structures that communicate cultural status to the world.

“I aspire to figure out a politics of form, that responds to the politics of resolution,” the artist said. “I want my form to not be not just beautiful aesthetically, and in high-resolution—but to mean something in relation to the third-world aspirations.”

She said low-resolution as a political form is a conversation about the way technology has progressed in the last two decades and how it can be used to tell the story of the capitalistic desires and the endless hunger for more that everyone is complicit in longing for. In many ways, she said, a low-resolution image is more mesmerizing and seductive than a high-resolution image.

Chaudhri spends six months of every year in Guilford and the other in Pakistan. She will soon be returning to work on her new project, Karachi Beach Radio, in collaboration with German artist Julia Tieke. Before she goes, she said she hopes There Was Nothing will inspire people to question their own aspirations, the complicity they have, and their own drive to create certain types of images of cities.

“There is a complicity to aspiration no matter what side you’re in,” she noted. “Are we happy with what’s given to us as a result?”

Yaminay Chaudhri: There was Nothing – Kuch bhi Naheen Tha! is on view at Artspace New Haven through April 27. For more information on hours and location, visit Artspace's website.