Sarah Khurshid Khan

media release: Through March 5, 2023

Reception, Thursday, March 2, 5-7pm

Undisciplined Pleasures, Vigilant Defiance

Sarah Khurshid Khan

Sarah K. Khan’s exhibition is inspired by the Central Indian manuscript Ni‘matnāma, The Book of Delights, a cookbook written in Persian and Urdu and illustrated in the South Asian Sultanate miniature painting tradition. In the manuscript African, Arab, Turkic, and Central Asian women dutifully serve and surround the bon viveur Sultan Ghiyath Shah of Malwa (Mandu). During his reign from 1469-1500 CE, Sultan Ghiyath commissioned the cookbook in Shadiabad, his City of Joy. The manuscript includes detailed cookware, flora, and vibrant illustrations. The Sultan’s zenāna/harem are demure and dutiful, frozen in time, skillfully preparing spice laden foods, medicinals, attars and aphrodisiacs. At the behest of the Sultan, the women also hunt, fish, and engage in culinary, philosophical and religious debates.

Food historians focus on the recipes of rich savories, medicinal remedies, perfumes, and hunting practices with slight notice, if any, to the women in Ghiyath Shah’s court service, known for having over 12,000 women including entertainers and scholars. The ordinary women’s lives depicted remain in the background – those who harvested, hunted, prepared, cooked, and served in infinite ways. Originally painted with a range of skin colors, the women-identified individuals worked, created, served, and most likely serviced the Shah. Yet from where, in that vast Central Indian and African Indian Ocean Worlds, did they come? What were their names and nuanced narratives? Did they consider the work a delight? Did they define the city as joyous?

Women of Massive Delight / Our Own Sister Pantheon

The Pleasures of Defiance

Sarah K. Khan radically reimagines this illustrated cookbook in a new playful, visual critical fabulation. She offers an alternative universe where named, assertive, empowered women, freed from positions of servitude, engage and care for each other. Khan’s iteration frees the eighteen femmes from their frozen stances. Now fully frontal, they are armed with weapons of mass creation and weapons of mass destruction—rolling pins, knives, swords, a German Lugar, rulers, spoons, spears, wine glasses, fire and blow torches.

Arising patterned and bejeweled, the sheroes meet across time and space to participate in “undisciplined pleasures.” Conjured from the ocean, the primordial expanse and the galactic star formations, they emerge unbound with the right to narrate their own stories. Their pleasures are ignited and sustained through intimate gestures, foods and medicines in all types of vessels in a courtly environment. And when called to arms, the women brandish an array of weapons, defiant in their stand against injustice.

They appear in a talismanic formation, surrounded with a geometric pattern and/or a recurring map of the world from the 12th Century. Named and free from service to the Sultan, they materialize from the fertile firmament. Adorned with words, patterns and shapes that confer magical blessings, they rejoice in radically boundless ways. Invoked into the past, their bright futures are guaranteed to sparkle.

Three historical female figures appear from the Indian Ocean’s East African, Arab, and South Asian worlds: Queen Bilqis, Razia Sultan, and Freedom Fighter Abebach. Bilqis hails from ancient Ethiopia and Yemen areas, claimed by both. Razia was a Sultanate period ruler who was beloved by her Delhi community, and Weyzero Abebach advocated a call to arms among her Ethiopian sisters to fight fascism in the 1930s.

Creating her own pantheon, Sarah K. Khan defies erasure, inscribes lost narratives, and revises histories.

Sarah Kharshid Khan (MS, MPH, PhD) is a US multi-media maker and scholar based in New York City and rural Massachussetts. She uses photography, films, video art, printmaking, maps, and writing to explore food, culture, women, migration, and identity in urban and rural environments. She utilizes food to provoke thought about injustice towards people and the planet.