Critical Encounters
Alternate Imaginaries for the Kinara: Ravi’s Edge as a Threshold
Research (2024).
MIT Department of Architecture. 2024.
In the lower riparian landscape of Punjab, Pakistan, various communities confront the challenges of living within the active floodplain of river Ravi as it flows alongside the city of Lahore. These communities navigate the dissonances of the river’s edge—its Kinara, marked and molded by persistent colonial (mis)representations rooted in practices of erasure and division. Stepping away from historical depictions that have reduced the river to a mere resource for acquisition, this thesis engages with design and the oral tradition of storytelling, known as Qissa Khwani, to propose new modes of knowing, witnessing, and ultimately, cultivating alternative imaginaries for Ravi. It stages newer encounters and engagements with the river and its communities by stitching together stories of numerous community members, the dwellers, the boatmen, and the civil defense divers, actively defying and transforming the seemingly static Kinara—their home—through cultural and economic production.
See More: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/157338
Ravi: Tales from a River
Shortfilm (9:14)
Directed by Mahwish Khalil. Produced by Huma Gupta. Funding support from The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. A Climate Futures, Cities Past Production. 2023.
Set on the banks of the river Ravi in Lahore, Pakistan, Ravi: Tales from a River stages a conversation between the prose of an aging boatman and the poetic reminiscences of the river to capture a glimpse of the river's earlier promise before the city's growing infrastructure gradually consumes its ecological heritage.
See More: https://jaeonline.org/issue-article/may-our-egos-die-so-that-the-world-may-live/
Redrawing Constructed Landscapes
Excerpt (2025)
Khalil. Mahwish, Silt Magazine. Entwined: Land & Us. Issue 02. 2024.
This excerpt challenges preconceived notions of representing contested sites.
See More: https://siltmagazine.cargo.site./khalil-redrawing-constructed-landscapes