— Gregory Colbert T This Land is Your Land, curated by Imran Qureshi, takes its title from a poem by Woody Guthrie signifying the message that we (including wildlife) are all equally entitled to the land we stand on. The exhibition features work by Elisa Caldana and Kamran Saleem that addresses a shared desire for all species to participate in a universal conversation and sees nature as the greatest storyteller of all. Elisa Caldana, born in 1986, is an Italian artist working primarily with sculpture, performance, film and writing.
She graduated from Städelschule Frankfurt, and the University of Venice, and has shown internationally at The Hague, Amsterdam, Rome, Bologna, Turin, London, Mexico City, Tokyo and Frankfurt-am-Main. She is an alumna of Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, and a recipient of the Mondrian Fund. , comprising a video projection and a soundscape, was produced with Luisa Puterman (composer) and Zeerak Ahmed (vocalist) in collaboration with Vasl Artists’ Association in Karachi - where she had been an artist-in-residence (2024).
The video piece “explores the identity of a falcon,” taken captive in Malir and tied to a charpoy. The audio piece originated “as an attempt at imagining a sound identity for the bird..
. without words.” Falconry is one of the oldest known human activities, dating back millennia to before the existence of written history.
Whether it is practised for survival, for sport, or as a way of honouring the past, it continues to.