There is something unsettling about places that continue to exist only in memory. They linger somewhere between reality and imagination. They carry fragments of lives that can no longer be revisited.
Memory, Belonging and Disappearance
Zahabia Khozema’s ‘A Memory Catcher Visited My Town’ is built around this fragile space between remembering and forgetting. The exhibition at Vasl Gallery draws inspiration from the recollections of a boy who grew up in an industrial town in central Punjab. It becomes less a record of a disappearing place and more a meditation on belonging, loss and the landscapes we carry within us.
The artist’s statement introduces a stone-crusher, a goat-grazer and a coal-miner. They await the arrival of a “memory catcher.” The story unfolds almost like folklore. Yet beneath its poetic language lies a sobering reality.
The town gradually disappears under capitalist expansion, economic violence and climate change. Khozema does not document this transformation literally. Instead, she explores what remains when homes, communities and identities begin to dissolve.
Empty Houses and the Landscape of Memory
This sense of abandonment is particularly evident in How Many Times Did You Pass by This House? An empty dwelling stands as more than an architectural form. Stripped of human presence, it suggests that buildings, much like people, retain the memories of those who once inhabited them.
Through luminous colours and dreamlike settings, Zahabia Khozema explores how memory preserves places long after they have disappeared from the physical world.
Similarly, Let Us Meet Here Again features a solitary chair within an expansive landscape. The ordinary object becomes a poignant symbol of absence.
The chair inspires conversations that never took place. It recalls people who never returned and places that continue to wait long after they have been forgotten.
The paintings rarely feel tied to a specific geography. Rivers, abandoned houses, flowering trees and open landscapes drift between dream and recollection. They occupy a liminal territory where certainty gives way to sensation.
Rather than reconstructing a town with documentary precision, Khozema paints the emotional architecture of remembrance. The viewer navigates spaces that feel familiar without ever becoming fully identifiable. They seem assembled from scattered fragments of childhood.
Colour and the Fragmented Nature of Memory
Perhaps the exhibition’s most compelling quality is its use of colour. A body of work addressing displacement, environmental decline and erasure might seem likely to rely on subdued tones.
Yet Khozema embraces intensely saturated blues, luminous pinks, violets and fiery oranges. In When the Mountains Called for Us, broad, expressive passages of warm colour meet seemingly unfinished forms and abrupt gestures. These elements lend the work an almost dreamlike quality.
The looseness of the composition depicts the fragmented way memory often survives. Likewise, What Was Behind This is dominated by glowing reds and magentas. Delicate passages of cool blue interrupt these colours. Together, they suggest that warmth and melancholy can exist within the same remembered moment.
Materiality and Emotional Atmosphere
Materiality further strengthens this atmosphere. Khozema works with oil pastel and oil sticks. She builds dense, tactile surfaces that reward prolonged looking.
Thick deposits of pigment, energetic scribbles and layered marks prevent the paintings from becoming overly polished.
While deeply personal, the exhibition also gestures towards wider political realities. The vanished town is not presented as the inevitable consequence of time. Instead, it emerges from systems that value extraction over communities and development over continuity.
Climate change further deepens this vulnerability. It reminds us that landscapes and livelihoods often disappear together.
Capitalist Erasure and Environmental Decline
Although the exhibition draws upon themes of capitalist erasure, economic violence and environmental decline, these ideas remain understated within the paintings themselves.
Khozema does not confront the viewer directly. Instead, she allows these ideas to emerge gradually through atmosphere and memory. This approach invites viewers to feel their emotional weight before recognising their broader social implications.
Remembering as Resistance
‘A Memory Catcher Visited My Town’ ultimately becomes an act of resistance. By preserving the emotional geography of a place, Khozema suggests that remembering itself can become a way of resisting disappearance.
The exhibition stays long after one leaves the gallery. It does so not simply because it reminds us of what has been lost. It also asks what remains when an entire town survives only in the memories of those who once called it home.
‘A Memory Catcher Visited My Town’ was on display at Vasl Gallery in Karachi from July 28-August 7, 2026.
