Our cover image is a photograph of Pakistani artist Naiza Khan's site-specific work, Henna Hands (2002), for which she used stencils to apply henna paste in the form of a female nude to a wall in Karachi's Railway Cantonment area. As Khan writes, “Henna, an organic pigment, in its capacity to stain, to mark the body, works as a metaphor to suggest the physicality of the body. The residue it leaves in the skin . . . embodies the notion of vulnerability, and a feeling of sensuality.”1 Khan's project was driven by her desire to find a different audience for her work. She notes that “visible alterations and additions to the work [and] censorship of body parts . . . [served as] indicators of how ordinary people have ‘viewed’ these figures.”2 “In retrospect,” Khan recently recalled, “I feel this was the beginning of my intervention into public spaces.”...
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