Your Tongue in my Mouth

In 1962, Ayub Khan’s military government dismantled ‘Malika Victoria’, dispersing the many components of the memorial to the Imperial Queen, which eventually found their way across the city. The marble and bronze monument was originally commissioned to the sculptor Sir Hamo Thornycroft, and inaugurated in 1906, by George the V at Frere Hall, Karachi.

Immediately after independence in August 1947, the government of Pakistan began the long process that would, over the next few decades, modify street names, discard memorials, reshape cultural markers, revise school textbooks, weekends, architecture, law and language. To heal the deep wounds of partition, and in a hurry to distance itself from anything unIslamic, centuries of syncretic cultural and religious rituals were slowly stripped away, eroded and transformed in collective memory.

Growing up in Karachi, Mulji navigated her way between the disembodied heads and limbs of discarded statues, in the back corridors of Mohatta Palace, then the abandoned home of Fatima Jinnah. In an article in The Herald magazine from 1994, she came across a vivid description of a pedestal outside the Karachi Municipal Corporation Headquarters. Like any city bench, it was found variously occupied by loungers, eating or waiting; cats devouring leftover food and crows and kites swooping down, after the last morsels. No one knew or cared that this was the plinth where once stood an imposing marble statue of the former Empress of India.

This year, the artist journeyed back to Karachi to find this plinth. In the process, stumbling upon other fragments of the memorial. The body of resulting work presented here centres on collective memory, time, place and belonging; complicating accepted historical linearity, placing two worlds in parallel entanglement, taking the viewer to glimpse geographies other than their own and to re-read illegible stories.

Huma Mulji is one of two artists selected for The South West Showcase 2022. South West Showcase is a recurring open call platform (est. 2013), showcasing artists from across the South West region. The showcase aims to support artists working and living in the South West through a year-long programme of mentoring and support with an exhibition outcome; presenting a long-term commitment to profiling and supporting the practises of artists in this region.

South West Showcase selection panel:  

Helen Cammock 

Mohini Chandra 

Rosie Mills Eckmire

Zoe Watson

Hannah Rose 

Stephen Felmingham 

Stephanie Owens