Sarah Khurshid Khan’s Flowers Coming Out of Their Mouths brings 27 new collages to the MAG Galleries along with ceramic pieces that communicate playful and poignant messages about women and ancestral history. In an ongoing exploration of the Persian Cook/Book of Life from Central India her collages draw on references to nature and diverse cultures.
Khan’s collages are laced with stylized plants and flowers inspired by indigenous African, Arab, and Asian peoples of the ocean world. The flora includes acacia trees, barley, black pepper, cinnamon, dates, frankincense, myrrh, orange blossom, and rose. Intersecting with ancient and Islamic geometries, the collages include diverse ancient maps, world languages, archival imagery from across regional ocean worlds, and hand-marbled papers. The theme running throughout the body of work elevates and recognizes domestic women’s spaces as places of science, deep ecological knowledge, pleasure, and defiance.
‘The Book of Delights‘
The Book of Delights (1469–1500 CE) inspired the artist’s recent work. The cookbook, written in Persian and illustrated in the Sultanate miniature painting tradition, depicts African, Arab, Turkic, and Central Asian women dutifully serving and surrounding the Sultan Ghiyath Shah of Malwa. Largely intact, the vibrant miniature illustrations include detailed cookware, flora, and pastel imagery in which polyethnic attendants, shown in half and three-quarter profiles, skillfully prepare spice-laden foods, medicinals, attars, and aphrodisiacs. At the Sultan’s request, the women hunt, fish, and engage in animated culinary, philosophical, and religious debates.
Khan recasts the illustrated cookbooks to foreground the attendants who harvest, hunt, cook, and debate. The artist creates scenarios that cause us to ask, who were these women? What were their nuanced narratives? If the polyethnic world of the zenana/harem prospered unfettered, with the Sultan canceled, what might these unimagined lives and worlds dream into? Khan dismantles and reframes the book, emphasizing the femmes, foodways, and plants, celebrating their playfulness and power.
Bilqis, Defender features a screen print on the top left based on a photograph of a textile that the artist’s Nani (mother’s mother) made 70–80 years ago. Bilqis is surrounded by purple Coptic patterns in the background and her double/shadow image of black pepper cut in the shape of her own form. Overlaid are polyglot names in diverse scripts of the word “black pepper” as well as part of a map of the Persian Gulf.
‘Weapons of mass creation/destruction’
The porcelain series Weapons of Mass Creation/Destruction, adorns the gallery and complements Khan’s collages. In Bake or Bludgeon — Women, Life, Freedom in Persian & Kurdish on 12 porcelain rolling pins with blue and white script, Khan works with slip-cast molds and porcelain, a material whose history is deeply entangled with narratives of colonial trade, imperial desire, and cultural appropriation. These porcelains are decorated with imagery sourced from former imperial libraries and archives.
Similarly, Weapons of Mass Creation/Destruction, Defend or Destroy? (2025), featured image above, shows a neat row of eight interlocking porcelain Lugers covered in spice images. The femmes and heroes can now decide their own destiny. Bake or bludgeon? Defend or destroy?
Recasting the past
Khan’s multimedia work grew out of her scholarly work in New York and Western Massachusetts. A two-time Fulbright Fellow, Khan holds a B.A. in Southwest Asian and North African history and Arabic (Smith College), two master’s degrees in public health and nutrition (Columbia University), and a Ph.D. in plant sciences (New York Botanical Garden-CUNY). Her practice draws on this extensive global fieldwork and research. She has spent decades researching food and traditional ecological knowledge systems including integrative medicine, plant sciences, and agro-ecology.
The artist brings a level of attention to issues like plant names, for example, which are written in their precolonial polyethnic names, challenging the western taxonomy of botany that categorized and erased their origins alongside their original cultures and knowledge systems. “I playfully imagine these femmes, endow them with nuanced lives and fabricate them beyond the confines of denied and erased histories. I assure futures by recasting the past.”
Flowers Coming Out of Their Mouths will be on view through Sept. 27 at Mag Galleries. An artist conversation and other events are planned for Friday, Sept. 11, 5 to 7 p.m.
