Studies for a Starry Night 1-94 (2019) is a sculptural installation comprising 94 unique hand-shaped plates of earthen stoneware and glazed porcelain. The work carefully extends Hajra Waheed’s signature exploration of the night sky, a meticulous repetition of a vast expanse that remains pivotal to the artist’s oeuvre. Long used as a guide for orientation and survival, the sky here becomes a site of quiet study, a meditation and mediation representing one sky fractured at once into multiple vantage points.

Both Studies for a Starry Night, 1-94 and The Kamal (2025) – a set of new works on paper inspired by a namesake poem written by the artist in 2018 – explore themes of navigation, displacement, and collective memory. The kamal, also known as the khashaba (meaning “wood” in Arabic), is a celestial navigational tool used to determine latitude, having enabled some of the earliest known latitude-based sailing. Developed by Arab seafarers in the 9th century and soon after adopted by Indian and East African sailors, it became widely used across the Indian Ocean, particularly for estimating distances to land. Its design required no written language or advanced instruments, making it accessible across diverse maritime cultures. Relying solely on physical alignment and memory – rather than on written instructions or mathematical calculations – the kamal was part of an oral and visual tradition, with its use passed down through generations of sailors, not through texts or charts, but through direct transmission: observation, repetition, and embodied practice. Waheed reflects on these metaphors of navigation, survival, and the capacity to f ind direction and hope, even amidst times of uncertainty.

Born in 1980 in Canada and raised in Saudi Arabia, Waheed’s familial histories trace back to Hyderabad, India, with ancestral ties extending to regions including Turkey and Yemen – reflecting centuries of movement across and between the Indian Ocean and Central Asia. Though situated inland, Hyderabad was historically a major center of trade, scholarship, and cultural exchange, deeply connected to both maritime and overland networks that linked the Indian subcontinent with Central Asia, Africa, and the broader Indian Ocean world. Early cartographic records and historical accounts capture the city’s strategic role within these global routes, documenting its layered history of encounter and transformation. This enduring legacy of mobility continues to shape Waheed’s life and work – grounding her explorations of displacement, orientation, and collective memory in a deeply personal, transregional lineage. Her practice continually resists borders, embodying a world shaped as much by rupture and exile as by connection and continuity.