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Tasbeeh

Hira Butt, Ort Gallery & Art Soch Gallery

Tasbeeh explores the age-old South-Asian cultural ritual known as Khatam. 

Khatam consists of people gathering to make repetitive prayers on date seeds or beads that are strung together in the form of a Tasbeeh. Khatam is a community-based spiritual practice that encourages people, especially women, to come together and share their thoughts, prayers and experiences.

This project is a collaboration between Hira Butt, Ort Gallery, Birmingham, England and Art Soch Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan.

Hira co-hosted an online event with Ort Gallery and Art Soch Gallery, where she examined whether we should revive traditional rituals to reconnect with ourselves and others and explored how daily affirmations, as endorsed by many social media gurus, life coaches and international entrepreneurs, have been co-opted and secularised in the digital age. 

The event on 26 March 2022 had 19 participants from diverse intellectual backgrounds from different cities in Pakistan and England. Hira felt humbled by the response she received. Participants opened up and shared their experiences, childhood memories and vulnerabilities and wanted to be informed of any upcoming events like this again. 

The talk served as a first step and thorough research for the development of Hira’s project Tasbeeh.


Image: Zoom still from Tasbeeh workshop

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