Laiba Raja
Laiba Raja (b.1998, Lahore) lives and works in London.
She is an artist, performer and writer and her work examines traditions of poetry informing women's resistance poetics in Pakistan and their engagement with an Indo-Persian form of poetry called the ghazal. She utilises texts from her predecessors to create dialogue and connection between intergenerational voices. Alongside her writing, she uses Hauntology to process the material realities of grief and time applying Sufi-Islamic philosophical thinking. She has worked closely with a women's rights group (Aurat March) in Pakistan since 2019, making socially engaged poster art and has been involved in many social media campaigns, most notably the 2022 manifesto, “Re-Imagining Justice.”
This Home is Haunted (2022), set in Lahore Pakistan details how Covid-19, shaped the realities of living in quarantine and dealing with the loss of family. The protagonist, a flaneur traversing her neighbourhood in Lahore depicts balcony views of deserted streets and ghost-like spectral figures existing within the city. These series of drawings endeavour to represent the seemingly infinite layers of grief catalysed by this global catastrophe. Through self-reflection and conversations with one another, the ghosts find comfort in sharing their enduring fears, all while navigating a darker, sombre and eerie world. The book engages Sufi-Islamic modes of mystical love and grief.
This city, elderly in its wisdom, garnered through the trials of time, is a witness to lives lived and lives lost. It has always been there, in the backdrop of my life, like a forbearing grandparent, the tender hold of a concrete body. A reserve of ancient knowledge, it has seen all the cycles of the human experience, the rise and the fall, the sweltering brights and the smoggiest dulls.
In all the time it stood tall, siege after endless siege, it has developed a sixth sense, where its infinite intuition guides us to destined love.
We, through the city, keep wandering, reaching, con-necting, to the little yellow pockets of love and warmth, that root the experience of living here.
So I've learned, to really appreciate the sanctity of a city is to experience it in love.
This Home is Haunted (2022)
26.1 x 42.4 cm
Reunion, Pastels on Cartridge Paper,
60 x 85 cm, 2022.
Mourning Home, Pastel on Cartridge paper,
60 x 85 cm, 2022.
Though the city is also adept, in the ways it changes, morphs, sheds, and shape-shifts to take the many forms that mean different things to different people. Accustomed to retrograde, it subscribes to no fixed weather patterns, or traffic laws, nor common sense. It has curated a world of its own, so out of reach from the bounds of what is logical. It operates on its own whims, indulges its fantasies and makes all of us surrender to its every impulse. To bear this city, I have learned to look more widely into its expanse. To not subsume in my disappointment by accepting things for what they are, but to learn from the experience of living here--to let go of control, or to give up the unwin-able race with time, or to understand the truths about the depth of love. To have spent most of my life in its constant camaraderie means to continually erase, redraw, and mend the relationship I’ve established with and through it.
-- This Home is Hunted
'As for the Ghosts, they are the past and the present trying to coexist, so they’ve made a home here too. I wave at them sometimes when I see them looking at me. I’ve learned to become unbothered by their haunting. They come and go, the most I can do for myself is cultivate momentary peace.' --This Home is Haunted
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