Reclaiming Blue: for the river and the sea

Zayaan Khan’s practice as an artist and researcher have focus on land and its complex, varied meanings to different people have also deepened her work of looking at humans’ relationship with plants, for food, for fragrance, for ornament, and in what ways plant, human and land entanglements have contributed to injustice.

In these pieces, she explores the herstory of the Company Gardens in Cape Town, staying with the painful reality of how the Rose Garden was tended and cared by enslaved people. How the roses we enjoy today in this garden and others in South Africa, carry with them the embodied traumas of enslaved Black and Brown peoples. Her installation of dried rose petals from the Company Gardens, along with a visual poem, Khan reflects: “... did some blooms get stuffed into cleavage, or hidden in pockets or undergarments, to make sleeping quarters more bearable?”