Event Details - Monday Night Lecture-Salar Mameni (University of California, Berkeley), “Flood"

 In this talk Salar Mameni discusses the extreme heat waves, flooding and cyclones that have affected the southern coastal regions of Pakistan, with the most recent flood occurring in summer 2022, through the work of the contemporary Pakistani artist Zahra Malkani. The talk centers Malkani’s soundscapes and visual multi-modal presentations of spiritual, activist, and mourning practices of coastal communities as an entry point into a conversation about climate disasters, extractive economies, aesthetic practices, and indigenous grieving traditions. Through the notion of the “oceanic feeling,” a term Malkani uses for her audio-visual recordings, Mameni discusses the incongruency of the spiritual and the psychoanalytic and how the ocean, and other bodies of water, have come to signify both the depths of the psyche and the ungraspable flows of the sacred.