Sarah K. Khan: Pleasure & Defiance
The Book of Delights, Nimatnāma, sparked my recent bodies of works—prints, ceramics, motion graphics. The cookbook, written in Persian, is illustrated in the Sultanate miniature painting tradition. In the manuscript miniature paintings, African, Arab, Turkic, and Central Asian women dutifully serve and surround the bon-viveur patriarch Ghiyath Shah of Malwa. The Sultan commissioned the cookbook in Shadiabad, when he retired to his City of Joy, 1469–1500 CE. Largely intact, the miniatures include detailed cookware, flora, and pastel-vibrant illustrations that surround the Sultan. Demure and dutiful polyethnic attendants, frozen in half or three-quarter profiles, prepare spice-laden foods, medicinals, attars and aphrodisiacs with skill. At the Sultan’s request, the women hunt, fish, and engage in animated culinary, philosophical and religious debates.
And yet, the illustrated cookbook demanded a recasting. Few notice the attendants who harvest, hunt, prepare, and cook. The original images portray cosmopolitan femmes/women who serve, and most likely service the Shah. Yet we know little about the ordinary African, Arab, Turkic, and Central Asian women’s lives. From where, in that vast Central Indian and African Indian Ocean Worlds, did the disregarded come? What were their nuanced narratives? Did they consider the work a delight? I ask, If the polyethnic world of the zenāna/harem prospered unfettered, with the Sultan cancelled, what might these un-imagined lives and worlds dream into?
And here is where you find the work today. It is in the dismantling and reassembling of The Book of Delights, with an emphasis on the array of ethnicities, foodways, and plants represented that I expand. The acts allow a death of one form and the rebirth, not only of seriously playful characters, but also of the self and unimagined possibilities for others too. By recreating the past, I assure futures.
Cove Street Arts (71 Cove Street, Portland, Maine) August 17 – October 7, 2023. Curated by the Indigo Arts Alliance.
Read a review of the show on HyperAllergic and Garland Magazine.
