Hajra Waheed at São Paulo Biennial
December 19, 2025
Discover the installation of « the Kamal » (2025) by Hajra Waheed at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo! On view until January 11th.
The Kamal, also known as the khashaba (meaning ‘wood’ in Arabic), is a celestial navigational tool used to determine latitude, enabling some of the earliest known latitude-based sailing. Developed by Arab seafarers in the 9th c. and soon after adopted by Indian and East African sailors, it became widely used across the Indian Ocean. Its design required no written language or advanced instruments, relying solely on physical alignment and memory; an oral and visual tradition passed down through direct transmission: observation, repetition, and embodied practice. Intimate and reciprocal, it calibrated the senses to the rhythms of celestial movement, where the body became an archive, with memory held in hands and horizon lines.
Inspired by a namesake poem the artist wrote in 2018, *The Kamal 1–22 (2025)* extends Waheed’s signature exploration of the night sky through a series of correspondences. 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 region. 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 and grounds her explorations of displacement, orientation, and collective memory in a deeply personal, trans regional lineage. Her practice continually resists borders, embodying a world shaped as much by rupture and exile as by connection and continuity.