Exhibition Info
Monsoon winds propelled dhows across oceans African, Arab, and Asian. People and their material cultures laden with scents and spices traversed waves en route to new lands. Inspired by pre-colonial Indian Ocean worlds, Sarah K. Khan delves into the multitude of cultures, languages, sounds, and smells that she embodies to salvage submerged narratives and transpose them onto blue and white porcelains, layered prints, and films.
As points of departure, Khan mines colonial archives that hold cultural treasures such as the 16th-century Sultanate period recipe book The Book of Delights and a 16th-century Shirazi cosmology The Wonders of Creatures and the Marvels of Creation. The visual cultures Khan draws from these worn manuscripts brim with stylized depictions of people and plants, intertwining food, flora, and foodware. Isolated and detached from their origins, these sources languish in The British Library, The New York Public Library, and The New York Botanical Garden. In her new renderings, Khan confronts looted archives and contests hierarchies of naming, gendering, and classification.
At the center of the exhibition lies Speak Sing Shout: We, Too, Sing America, an eight-piece set of blue and white porcelain serving vessels that dwell on a tiled table with an abstracted Islamic world map, created before cartographers documented the Americas. Each container displays images of spices, delicate flowers, and incense from The Book of Delights and other South Asian, Persian, and Arab sources. Black pepper, cinnamon, clove, frankincense, myrrh, nutmeg, orange blossom, and rose are depicted; culinary ingredients that originated in Global South soils and have become ubiquitous in religious realms and kitchens worldwide.
Khan embraces her ancestors’ geographies, fluid like the unbordered monsoon winds and rains, reminding us that what she carries—past, present, and future—is representative of what it means to be American.
Sarah K. Khan’s Speak Sing Shout: We, Too, Sing America is the third artwork commissioned for “What Can Become of Us?,” a collaboration between the Stanford Institute for Advancing Just Societies and Zócalo Public Square, envisioning new perspectives on migration, America’s changing communities, and how people come together across differences. The year-long series activates four regions of the United States and highlights newly commissioned works of art to inspire a national conversation, through exhibitions, public programs, and essays, about working toward a better future.
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