One Piece by Sa’dia Rehman, Flooded Grave 1

Sa’dia Rehman, Flooded Grave 1, 2024. Installation view at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University. Photo by Mateo Serna Zapata.

Pakistan celebrates its dams; They are engineering marvels, symbols of the country’s modernity, and often, tourist hotspots. The reservoirs and surrounding lands of many of the country’s 150 dams have been built up to accommodate picnics, boating, swimming, and fishing. Contemporary artist Sa’dia Rehman has a unique connection to the Tarbela Dam, Pakistan’s largest and most famous one: their family was displaced for its construction.

Generations of their ancestors had lived and farmed in Khar Kot, an area near the Indus River that is now the Tarbela reservoir. In their recent exhibition, the river runs slow and deep and all the bones of my ancestors / have risen to the surface to knock and click like the sounds of trees in the air, Rehman explored this history through video, textile works, hand painted signs, rebar sculptures, wall drawings, found objects, and monoprints. It’s a poetic and ghostly installation. Kajal connected with the artist to discuss the haunting rebar sculpture Flooded Grave 1 and their nuanced ruminations on this family history and loss.

Kajal: Family has informed your practice for a few years now but this is the first time I’ve seen you dwell on a specific memory or event in your work. Can you talk more about this personal history and how it came to the forefront of your art making?

Sa’dia Rehman: I am tracing my family’s history of displacement from a part of the Indus River, near Islamabad, due to the construction of the hydroelectric Tarbela Dam in the 1960s. This is a story that has been in my family’s history for a long time. My siblings and I have known about it for years, but nobody in the family really talks about it. This story, of displacement, of the 184 villages that were forcefully shifted, isn’t heard. The story that is known, told, repeated, written in history is “This dam was a civic feat of engineering. It was an amazing monumental structure at the time and still. But also, thanks for your sacrifice, farmers and dwellers of the land.”

I was propelled to think about this family history in 2020, during the first few months of COVID, during the George Floyd protests. My work has always been political – to mean that the art ignites conversation about family, labor, empire – these highly contradictory and contested themes.

In March 2020 I was working toward a wall drawing titled The Land of Promise at The Columbus Museum of Art (CMA). For inspiration I looked at the CMA’s social photography collection and continued to draw on the present fiery outside of the museum walls. In my earlier works I drew on stencil making as an aesthetic of protest, but also as a way to think about loss and absence. To create a stencil, I am cutting out windows and puncturing paper or cardboard or Tyvek to create an image or a fragment of an image.

The fragment or the ruin was always in my work, but I didn’t understand truly why. That is what my hands just did, and my mind was often meditated on. And then, while finishing The Land of Promise, I thought about my own family’s loss and how this feeling embeds into generations. The displacement and the dam kind of latched on to the work and then it all made sense.

Sa’dia Rehman, The Land of Promise, Wall Drawing, 2020. Installation view and detail at the Columbus Museum of Art. Photo by Luke Stettner.

My family is from Islamabad and we visited the Simly Dam for day trips and picnics. The narrative I absorbed was definitely “These dams are a symbol of Pakistan’s advancement. A beautiful landmark to be celebrated.” I never heard of the displacement of what was on the land before the dam. Was your family adequately compensated? Or were they just “asked” to leave?

How can one be adequately compensated when they didn’t want to leave in the first place? I have heard and read that some families received monetary compensation ($500 USD at the time) and some are still fighting for any compensation. An area was designated for communities to move to, however, with that comes getting reacquainted with the land, dividing plots fairly, providing a different state-governing system rather than a tribal system, privatizing and paying for electricity, renegotiating education and who it serves, the people or the government.

This is a story that repeats globally in China, in countries in Africa, in South America. Mostly in the Global South. I have also been reading about the Klamath River that runs from Oregon to Sacramento, California. Five dams on the Klamath River are being destroyed beginning in 2023 to 2025 after years of work and protest from the Yurok Tribe and the Karuk Tribe. The river is being revegetated and the ecosystem is slowly and hopefully renewing and recovering. In the US, the government is seeing the uselessness of these hydroelectric dams. But at the same time, I’m not saying destroy all dams. I’m at a point in my research, where I’m just asking what happened. I’m imagining this kind of indigenous past, and then catching up to the present.

How have people reacted to your work, to this story?

I’ve been noticing that revealing this story makes many Pakistanis uncomfortable here, in the US, and there, in Pakistan. Oftentimes the dams, like many dams all over the world, are celebrated as nationalist feats or their monumental connection to civil advancement. However, land dispossession was a strategy by settler colonials to divide and disempower communities. The Tarbela Dam was funded by the World Bank (WB), which is made up of imperialist countries – the US, the UK, France, Germany, and Japan. For the past two years I have been reading declassified files in the WB archives in D.C. Similarly, I am questioning this access. What do I not have access to? And that is where the family interviews are essential. I started with the family interviews and then went to governmental documents.

This is hitting strangely close to home. My father worked for the World Bank in the 80s, around the same time as these dams were being built. He was advising on the infrastructure and education building that happened in the Gilgit region of Pakistan. I feel …complicit…

I would love to speak to your father about his work with the World Bank! I think in some ways we are all complicit to continue to make this machine function. However, there are small things we can do to disrupt it. I think this conversation between you and I is important for that disruption.

How does your family feel about this? Do they see it as “Oh, we did this wonderful thing for our country” or as a forced displacement?

I think most of them have said that, now that it’s said and done, “We sacrificed our homes and land for the country, for this dam.” There’s a sadness to their words when they share the stories of their land being dispossessed. When they remember the moment they were flooded out of their villages. When they were separated from rituals and ways of being for generations along the Indus, on the land. I’ve heard this pairing a lot – “grateful for y/our sacrifice.” That sounds like a great artwork title, right?

My nuclear family lives in the US. My parents immigrated here in the 60s. And two other families immigrated to the US in the 90s. My nuclear family is happy that I am writing this history. My family in Pakistan also wants the story to be told. But it is not only about the flooding. This story is entangled with being of the Pakistani diaspora, being born in an imperialist and militarist country, my parents migration to the US in the 1960s through the Hart Cellar Act, the trajectory of Islamophobia in the US and globally. It cannot be told without all these layers and nuances.

There is also the story of what happened after my family in Pakistan was displaced. They were each given land or had to purchase land or were given a small amount of monetary funds to purchase land. Some family members are still fighting in the courts to receive compensation. It was not only my family, but 184 villages who were deprived of clean water, traditional food sources, spiritual connections, and economic opportunities.

Sa’dia Rehman: the river runs slow and deep…, 2023. Installation view at the Wexner Center. Photo by Steven Takacs.

How did all of this research and thinking and feeling translate into the objects in this exhibition, This exhibition feels like one cohesive installation.

In Feb 2023, the Wexner Center for the Arts opened the show, the river runs slow and deep and all the bones of my ancestors / have risen to the surface to knock and click like the sounds of trees in the air. The entire show traveled to the Frost Museum of Art and was on view from February 3rd to April 17th 2024. The exhibition is comprised of a two-channel video, a long textile, scattered signs, rebar sculptures, a wall drawing, found objects, and monoprints. The multidisciplinary-ness encapsulates the many ways to enter the theme.

I went to Pakistan, in March 2022, for 10 days to research and look for my father’s submerged village. I took many photographs and shot hours of video. I thought I was going to use this footage to make drawings, to make sculptures, to make other things and then suddenly, I was making a video. There was this pull, the medium and the material pulled and pushed me to make a video! For the show at the Wexner Center, I put clay directly on the wall that fell apart, referencing the silt of the Indus River, the changing ecosystem of that area, the breakage, the loss, the remnants. At the Frost, I made an entirely different wall drawing with chalk.

Sa’dia Rehman, Wall Drawings from the river runs slow and deep… from the Wexner Center, 2023. Photo: Steven Takacs

The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami, FL 2024. Photo by Mateo Serna Zapata.

Are you referencing actual flooded and upturned graves in your rebar sculptures?

March, is still winter time in Pakistan, and I witnessed that the water in the reservoir created by the dam is so low that you can see things like the tops of mosques, the tops of shrines, walled interior of former homes and then there’s also the cemeteries. Because of the power of water, a lot of the cemeteries are underwater nine months out of the year and once winter comes, the water is so low that these graves emerge again and you can see cracks and upturned graves. So the abstracted one, Flooded Grave 2, is an upturned grave, emerging or submerging. Flooded Grave 1, the one that sits directly on the floor is similar to the graves I had seen in the area. They are often made of cement or marble and are large, thick slats that cover the coffin six feet below ground. I wanted to evoke some type of cemetery, or gravestone in the space.

I’m still thinking about more graves, possibly even a whole cemetery. I’m still looking at the photos I took in March. There’s more graves, some are intact but there are cracks all around them. There were graves from pre 1947. There’s some graves where we see specks of whites. Some family members painted the graves white or planted t-shirt-made flags as markers to locate their family graves.

Sa’dia Rehman, the river runs slow and deep…, 2024. Installation view at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University. Photo by Mateo Serna Zapata.

I think you’ve captured the tension we feel when looking at ruins, the beauty and the melancholia, the poetry and the ghosts. The sadness of deterioration.

Thank you for saying that. There is an ephemeral quality running through the show – the wall drawing, the rebar sculptures, and the Urdu primers in the vitrine. At the Frost Museum, the Urdu primers are shown as one object on a pedestal – an afterlife of the submerged. Inside the vitrine, I submerged a stack of elementary US History books. I am thinking about installing Flooded Grave 1 and 2 outdoors. They will rust over time, they’re already rusting in the exhibition space, slowly. In Flooded Grave 2 the largest section of the piece is already swooping. That swoop is getting heavier and deeper. By placing them outside, there is another element of death and growth. As the rebar decays, the seasonal plants grow around them.

Sa’dia Rehman, B, 2022.

Did visitors recognize these as graves or are these specifically Pakistani graves?

When I gave tours at the Wexner, I related them to the graves in New Orleans or Mexico. They are also flood zone areas and are places that are devastated by climate disaster. But even if you reflect on the tombs and mausoleums at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, one can see an aesthetic language. The abstract one [Flooded Grave 2] is the hardest to decipher visually but I kind of wanted it that way because it is an upturned grave.

How did you come to the rebar that you used to make Flooded Grave 1. I’d love to hear more about the physicality of using that medium and how you made it.

The imagery and material, rebar, came to me immediately. I purchased rebar from Lowe’s and then welded them together in these forms of graves. I had help welding them from Paul Simon, not the singer, but the incredibly talented blacksmith at The Ohio State University.

All of the work in this exhibition is meditating on the journey to the Indus River in March 2022, as well as my family history. When I had gone in March, I stayed at my aunt’s house, which is in a village where the whole community was displaced to. I’ve gone to Pakistan a handful of times growing up, and we always stay with my aunt. This time, the village knew I was returning to research the dam and the history of their displacement. Many came to my aunt’s house and told me stories and oftentimes, they would tell me about leaving their ancestors and their graves, and how they didn’t want to move. Some people were drowned in their sleep. They lost a lot of farm animals. And they did resist, they did protest. The army came with trucks to “help” put their belongings in the army trucks, but the people refused to leave. This exhibition anchors these points of grief, loss, death and renewal.

In the rebar pieces, I wanted to show that they’re not whole, they’re outlines of a grave. They are cradled within one another. They’re symmetrical, there’s an illusion –depending on where you are standing in the space and in some photos it looks flat. I had gone knowing someone who knew someone who knew someone could get me into this gated community that was built back in the 60s for the dam’s designers and architects and their families. While there were homes being built for the architects, villagers’ homes were being destroyed. When I visited the site in March, it was still being maintained and expanded, this time by Chinese laborers, I saw a lot of rebar. Rebar is often used to create and hold together cement. At the Tarbela Dam you can visibly see those cement blocks. And so I was just thinking about the bones of this massive structure and the bones of this story, the bones of history, the bones holding up this sacrifice.

Sketches, models, and process shots of Flooded Grave 1.

The very poetic title of this exhibition also mentions bones, can you tell me more about that phrase the river runs slow and deep and all the bones of my ancestors / have risen to the surface to knock and click like the sounds of trees in the air?

The title of the show comes from a line from my sister and writer, Bushra Rehman’s 2013 poem My Aba’s Masjid. We are synched creatively-oftentimes with extremely different lived experiences, but our themes are interconnected. I read the poems in 2013 and since this story has been orally passed down, both of us translated it into language and imagery, respectively. Structurally, the exhibition is knotted together through stanzas and bones. I see both as scaffolding that holds language and the body.

Is this an ongoing investigation? Can we expect further meditations on this displacement from you?

In my twenty years as an artist, I made vessels (teacups, lotahs) and replicated imagery through stencils. The vessels and the stencils speak to this negative/positive space, this absence and presence. Oftentimes the work was about grief and loss. It was after I started to dig deep into the connection of my family’s relationship to loss and grief through this forced displacement that I realized I was always in search of this palpable history.