In refusing to support an installation that named Rao Anwar, Karachi Biennale reveals the burden of privilege.

The state's habit of quashing citizens' attempts at meaningful and critical engagement with the city has been written on extensively. But it has taken on further immediacy in the wake of recent events.

Two years after its inception, the Karachi Biennale (KB) has connected Karachi (with art) by actually keeping a distance from the city's pressing issues - mainly its urban questions.

After Adeela Suleman's installation 'The Killing Fields of Karachi', which was about the 444 extrajudicial killings allegedly carried out by policeman Rao Anwar, was sealed, vandalised and forcibly removed by law enforcement agencies, the KB organisers issued a statement distancing itself from Suleman's piece for 'not [being] compatible with the ethos of KB19 whose theme is 'Ecology and the Environment'.'

Furthermore, it stated that the 'theme this year did not warrant political statement on an unrelated issue.'

The Killing Fields Of Karachi by Adeela Suleman after it was vandalised by officials

However, the fact is: there's no apolitical ecology. For the environment to remain untouched by politics, civilisation would have to cease to exist. Karachi's ecology is in crisis precisely due to the country's predatory political economy, which manifests itself in all its evil in the shape of land-grabbing and the development of housing societies.

And Karachi's Bahria Town and DHA City on the Super Highway, to cite two examples, have caused irreversible environmental damage. These projects were only made possible through brazen land-grabbing; and much of the land was taken from the poor at the barrel of Anwar's gun. The KB's theme, therefore, does warrant a political statement on this related issue.

The state's heavy-handed shutting down of an art installation was not as shocking as the craven response of the Karachi Biennale organisers

If the Biennale team doesn't want to own Suleman's work, it may as well entirely disown its stated theme of 'challeng[ing] mythologies of development cast in concrete, measured in extinct species, wasted bodies, sterile lands and poisoned waters.'

Because you cannot, for example, really talk about the disappearing mangroves and the dangers of reclaiming the sea without talking about the DHA. You cannot really talk about 'the toxins of industrial might and greed-based urban planning' by not talking about who is responsible.

The poor don't hesitate to name the culprits behind the...