Pleasure & Defiance
Sarah K. Khan
August 17 - October 7, 2023
Featured Artist
About the Show
Pleasure & Defiance features the prints, ceramics, and motion graphics of Sarah K. Khan. The exhibition is being presented in association with Indigo Arts Alliance, where Khan originated the work in the show during her residency.
Artist’s Statement:
The Book of Delights (1469–1500 CE), sparked my recent bodies of work - prints, ceramics, motion graphics. The cookbook, written in Persian and illustrated in the Sultanate miniature painting tradition, depicts African, Arab, Turkic, and Central Asian women dutifully serving and surrounding the Sultan Ghiyath Shah of Malwa. He commissioned the cookbook in Shadiabad, his retirement City of Joy. Largely intact, the miniatures include detailed cookware, flora, and pastel-vibrant illustrations. Polyethnic attendants, frozen in half or three-quarter profiles, prepare spice-laden foods, medicinals, attars and aphrodisiacs with skill. At the Sultan’s request, the women hunt, fish, and engage in animated culinary, philosophical and religious debates.
The illustrated cookbook demands a recasting. Few notice the attendants who harvest, hunt, cook and debate. The original images portray cosmopolitan femmes/women who serve, and most likely service the Shah. We know little about these women’s lives. From where, in that vast Central Indian and African Indian Ocean World, did they come? What were their nuanced narratives? Did they consider the work a delight? I ask, if the polyethnic world of the zenāna/harem prospered unfettered, with the Sultan cancelled, what might these un-imagined lives and worlds dream into?
And here is where you find the work today. It is in dismantling and reframing The Book of Delights with an emphasis on the femmes, foodways, and plants that I expansively imagine. This action buries one visual narrative and births, not only seriously playful characters, but also selves and unimagined others too. By recasting the past, I assure boundless futures.
- Sarah K. Khan
Read the review in Hyperallergic HERE.
Read the review in the Portland Press Herald HERE.
Preview the Exhibition
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