4–28.6.2026

(Closed on Midsummer’s Eve 19 June.)

The starting point for this project was a found dictionary of geography, circa 1960’s, that carried a range of topographic diagrams or cross-sectional drawings of terrain alongside definitions of geographic terms. I salvaged this book from a roadside book bazaar in Lahore shortly before leaving for Helsinki, on the other side of the world. I often leafed through it, drawn both to the diagrams in their distilled representation of the earth and geomorphological processes and to the language of terrain itself. Lifted from its geographic or scientific context, this language could just as easily describe relational, socio-psychological, and corporeal ways of moving in and through the world.

At the same time, I was going through my family’s archives of home movies from the 1990s and early 2000s, tracing my family’s movement across Pakistan’s varied and dramatic terrain. The lively action and haphazard motion of these films cloak layers of family drama and unrest, the highs and lows of growing up, and the many faultlines that run through close relationships. This is where my simultaneous explorations met: in the words that we use to index the land and our surroundings, and the language of the human heart, of longing, love, and disappointment. Mapping becomes an emotive rather than a scientific act; geography, something lived, immediate, held in the body.

In the installation accident, climatic, these explorations take the form of a visual poem inspired by diagrammatic approximations of terrain. The pseudo-perspective of the traditional block diagram here becomes a means of questioning any ‘accurate’ representation of scale and distance when it is filtered through memory. The labels, or guiding words, suggest both geologic and human/ linguistic processes, allowing the map to function on two planes.

Two moving image works accompany this map-poem: the first, doab (Urdu for “two waters”; used geographically to mean any land that lies between converging rivers) weaves together filmed sequences with geographical definitions of land and its features. It is an exercise in contemplating the personal and interior through the appropriated (and decontextualised) language of the exterior. The second video, a great circle, draws from fragments of dialogue transcribed from the home movies and reassembled as a script of directions for a scene that is perpetually being built. The work gathers a restless chorus: my father’s instructions as an amateur filmmaker, arranging bodies against landscapes; his warnings to the children as they move carefully through new geographies; and the murmur of adult conversation—plans, asides, and quips—circling in the background. Within this shifting field, the odd poetic observation surfaces in and is quietly subsumed by the noise.

Dua Rizvi is a visual artist and writer from Lahore, Pakistan, currently based in Helsinki. She studied painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore and has an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. Working across drawing, print, and moving image in her practice, she braids found and original media with fragments of her own writing to explore themes of perception and subjectivity, and the ambivalences of language. Her work has been shown at numerous international venues since 2010, notably as part of projects exploring migration, memory, and interculturality, such as at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, the Museo Diocesano in Milan, and Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. Alongside her artistic practice, Rizvi has written extensively on art and culture for English-language magazines, journals, and anthologies.