Sarah K. Khan
Sarah K Khan (b. Mangla, Pakistan) utilizes food to provoke thought about injustice towards people and the planet. She explores food, culture, women, migration, and identity in urban and rural environments. A multi-media maker and scholar, she uses photography, films, print-making, maps, and writing. To defy erasure and to build archives, simultaneously, Khan reveals the often invisible labor and mastery of the disregarded. To inscribe the denied into global and local multi-visual cultures, she researches and documents the lives of ordinary people who are extraordinary. Engaging slowly, she gets to know her subjects with empathy and respect. The subjects and subject matter, real or conjured, are complex individuals dealing with the challenges of life. The work captures a moment in time and space revealing the emotions and lived experiences, the humanity of those she encounters.
After a year as a Senior Research Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in India, she is creating multimedia vignettes highlighting the labor and knowledge of Indian women farmers . The morsels intersect globalization, climate change, environmental degradation, gender disparity, race and caste discrimination and farmers’ suicides in addition to the loss of crop, biological, cultural, culinary and linguistic diversities.
She creates content on Migrant Kitchens and the Food Craft Project. The goal is to relay the migrant stories, through the lens of food and craft with photography, film, interactive maps and story. Sarah continues her project entitled The Cookbook of Gestures and with a group of women cooks and farmers in Fez, Morocco. More recently, Sarah has been researching and creating work inspired by a Central Indian illustrated cookbook called the Book of Delights from 1505.
She has articles/photography in two edited volumes: “Supershero Amrita Partitioned Once, Migrated Twice,” in Women and Migrations: Responses in Art and History, edited by Drs. Deborah Willis, Ellyn Toscano and Kalia Brooks Nelson; and (2020). “To Sow and To Sew: Siddi Women Farmers (and Quilters) in Uttara Kannada, Karnataka, India,” in African Diasporan Communities Across South Asia, Volume 2, in The Afro-South Asian in the Global African Diaspora, 3-Volume Series, edited by Kenneth X. Robbins, Omar Ali, Beheroze Shroff, and Jazmin Graves, published by Greensboro, NC, USA; Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India: The University of North Carolina-Greensboro, NC, USA and Ahmedabad Gujarat India (the Ethiopian and East African Studies Project and Ahmedabad Sidi Heritage and Educational Center at Greenboro).
Sarah’s photography, films, and writing have also appeared in Museum of the Moving Image, Queens Museum, Asian Arts Initiative, AAWW Open City, Roads and Kingdoms, Culinary Backstreets, The Art of Eating, Modern Farmer and Yahoo India. She has numerous solo, group shows and screenings highlighting her photography, documentary films and prints. Her academic research on Ayurveda, traditional healing systems, nutrition, and the built environment has appeared in The American Botanical Council’s Herbal Gram, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Integrative Medicine, and in The American Journal of Health Education, respectively.
A two-time Fulbright recipient, Khan earned a BA in Middle Eastern history and Arabic (Smith College), two Masters (public health and nutrition, Columbia University) and a Ph.D. (traditional ecological knowledge systems, plant sciences, New York Botanical Garden-CUNY). She has received numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies to pursue her work. Most recent residencies include Princeton Artist-in-Residence ArtHx (2021-22), Ellis Beauregard (2021), Monson Arts (2021), Project for Empty Space Feminist Residency (2020), Indigo Arts Alliance (2019), and as the Boren Chertkov Residency for Labor and Justice at Blue Mountain Center (2019).
