There is something unsettling about places that continue to exist only in memory. They linger somewhere between reality and imagination, carrying fragments of lives that can no longer be revisited.
Zahabia Khozema’s ‘A Memory Catcher Visited My Town’ is built around this fragile space between remembering and forgetting. Inspired by the recollections of a boy who grew up in an industrial town in central Punjab, this exhibition at Vasl Gallery becomes less a record of a disappearing place and more a meditation on belonging, loss and the landscapes we carry within us.
The artist’s statement introduces a stone-crusher, a goat-grazer and a coal-miner awaiting the arrival of a “memory catcher.” It unfolds almost like folklore, yet beneath its poetic language lies a sobering reality. The town gradually disappears under the pressures of capitalist expansion, economic violence and climate change. Rather than documenting this transformation literally, Khozema explores what remains when homes, communities and identities begin to dissolve.
This sense of abandonment is particularly evident in How Many Times Did You Pass by This House?, where an empty dwelling stands as more than an architectural form. Stripped of human presence, it suggests that buildings, much like people, retain the memories of those who once inhabited them.
