TARQ presents, and the trees sing resistance songs by Rah Naqvi. Spanning painting, installation, textile, and film, the exhibition brings together Naqvi’s most recent body of work — one that threads through grief, faith, lamentation, and resistance, and offers an encounter with material as a site of discovery, memory, and time.
At the heart of their works in this show is a sustained and intimate engagement with soil. Naqvi has spent the past year collecting earth from their mother’s garden, returning to it on each visit home, developing pigments, and tracing what they call the “histories of dirt”. For Naqvi, soil is a speculative archive: a repository of what has been buried, forgotten, or silenced, and yet also a map of what persists. Alongside this, they work with soil from sites of conflict and worship, wood ash, copper filings, broken brick, rubble, and rusted nails. These are not merely materials but testimonies. This sustained proximity to the natural world has drawn Naqvi back, repeatedly, to the body. The human form appears in the work in increasingly literal terms, the body itself becoming a site through which histories of violence, faith, and survival are held and expressed.
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