22’

2016

The streets of Karachi, a metropolis of more than 20 million people, are cleaned daily by workers equipped with the most basic, makeshift, contraptions. Here, eleven city cleaners are seen in the video with primitive cleaning implements, occupied in an obviously futile effort to sweep all the sand from the beach into the ocean. The wind works in direct opposition to their travail, erasing, diminishing, and making inconsequential their labor, and perhaps their very “living sel[ves].” The video deals with the problematics of dominant systems, highlighting how we, as artists, are co-opted by, are complicit in, and perpetuate these exploitative socio-economic political regimes.