Water of Seven Seas


 ‘Red prayers’ presents and explores the dichotomy of the space, the internal /external, personal and collective contradictions, further exploring conflicts of identity, religion and struggle for survival. 
The performance welcomes and invites the viewer to step into a space filled with sensorial triggers. Smell, taste and sound engulfing the space, setting a meditative realm where time seems to have stopped.  

Red Prayers

Still Remained Muddy

This project seeks to re-examine our place in a constantly shifting, commodified, urban, increasingly compartmentalized lifestyle. While these aspects of our lives may seem to negate the body’s relationship with nature, they in fact create news ones that we often leave unexplored. It is this illusion of alienation which makes nature and our bodies appear to us benign or static.

Belonging Alienation
Purity Impurity
Active Passive
Self Other
Death Life
Death Birth
Singularity Union
Absence Presence

This performance aims to explore the dual relationship between the human body and nature characterized by a shifting balance between belonging and alienation. Through a series of 6 scripted and spontaneous acts, we look to explore the persistent need of human beings to try to belong and leave a mark in a vast expanse. By reacquainting ourselves with natural materials like water, air, sand, and dyes, we look to take an internal journey and resituate body in nature.

My soul washed after the water of Seven Seas, Sill remained Muddy

Once a pier that would be inundated with water, a subsistence fishing site for a community of fishermen, the pier is now a remnant of what it once was. Now deprived of its once defining characteristic - the ebb and flow of water - it has taken on a new identity in the city. Devoid of water, it’s original inhabitants that surrounded it - it stands as a reminder of the passage of time, and of absence. The pier is a skeleton, a memory, and a testament to what once was. It reflects a broader change in the geography and culture of Karachi. It illustrates both the fluid infinity of the sea and a static, concrete structure. The pier is also home to another collective memory - that of Mai Kolachi. part historic figure and part myth, Mai Kolachi is Karachi’s namesake - a woman who once walked into the sea to save her lover from drowning. 
Her figure is said to protect the city from floods and other threats from the sea. She remains a distant but persistent figure in Karachi’s shared unconscious. Like the pier itself, she exists as a memory, a non-human, living being representing the passage of time. Over the years, the red dye (sindoor) has been associated with her. Dye itself represents an attempt of human beings to leave a mark on a vast expanse, to create an impression on the world before departing, just as Mai Kolachi has. The fiery color, associated with passion, anger, and love, juxtaposed with the fluidity and infinity of the ocean, embodies the eternal clash of human emotions, as told and retold in countless myths throughout our history.

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Natasha Jozi

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