Foreground announce release of new File Note essay on Huma Mulji’s Your Tongue in My Mouth

We are delighted to announce In the Eye of the Storm, a newly commissioned text by Asma Mundrawala on Huma Mulji’s exhibition Your Tongue in My Mouth as part of the Document and Location programme.

In the Eye of the Storm is the fourth essay released in Foreground’s File Notes series, an occasional series of commissioned writing that will critically engage with different areas of Foreground’s programme.

The new essay explores Your Tongue in My Mouth, an exhibition by Huma Mulji that explores collective memory, time, place and belonging. 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.

Written by artist and theatre practitioner Asma Mundrawala, In the Eye of the Storm begins with a quote by Pakistani novelist Asad Muhammad Khan, in which he speaks of the time he and his contemporaries spent in ‘60s Karachi as being ‘in the centre of the storm, that distinctly silent circle, where we did not live, but rather, frequented.’ Mundrawala goes on to skillfully carry the reader through ideas at the core of Mulji’s Your Tongue in My Mouth while reflecting on how Karachi’s colonial past transformed its inhabitants’ relationship to language, collective storytelling and the physical space of the urban landscape.

‘In its unforgiving, constantly unravelling chaos, Karachi offers silent spaces where memory, emotions, passions, senses, and desires play out. When Khan likens his haven in Karachi to the centre of a storm, he also mentions that this invulnerability is relative. Whether existence is characterised by the unwavering calm of the centre, or the chaos of the circumambient perimeter where survival is exacting and formidable, the city offers perceptual spaces that enable the creation of associations through the senses and with locations and their inhabitants. It is in these physical and perceptual spaces that the theatre of the city plays out.’

In the Eye of the Storm can be read and downloaded for free via the Publications page on the Foreground website or the Writing page on the Document and Location website. Find out more about Huma Mulji here.