The rapid privatisation of Karachi’s waterfront encroaches on the last remaining open and free public spaces for the city’s working-class and indigenous fishing communities.
Karachi Beach Radio brings together sound artists, scholars, activists and the public to preserve stories of the biodiverse, culturally significant seafront in Pakistan’s Sindh province. Sound becomes a medium of inquiry and transmission, forging a connection to ecology and community. The results – intimate narrations, audio recordings and experimental soundscapes – are personal accounts of joy, love, fantasy and fear.
Karachi Beach Radio listens to the commons as it happens, and as it disappears… asking what the future might be. The project enables and encourages a level of empathy, support and a genuine connection rarely heard in mass media.
Yaminay Chaudhri
Yaminay Chaudhri was born in Karachi and studied architecture, studio art and philosophy. In her artistic practice, she uses digital media to respond to the architectures of aspiration, exploring the future of the commons in an age of hyper-performativity. Yaminay founded the Tentative Collective (2011–2017). She is a critic at Rhode Island School of Design and also teaches at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi.
Julia Tieke
Julia Tieke works with and around text and sound. She is affiliated with the radio arts department of the public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk Kultur in Berlin. In her work, she examines and explores acoustic storytelling, the use of radio as a social medium and how cities can be experienced via acoustic means. Her most recent works are based around research into the Cairo Congress of Arab Music of 1932.