Fazal Rizvi

Born in 1987 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Fazal Rizvi graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2010 and is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, photography, installation, video and text. His work has been exhibited locally and internationally, at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. He has taken part in a variety of residencies, including: the Arcus Project Residency, Japan; the British Council Residency at Gasworks, London; and the Murree Museum Artist Residency, Pakistan, as well as being the Art Writer in residence for VASL Residency in 2015. Rizvi has also been a core member of the Tentative Collective since 2014, and currently teaches at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi. Rizvi’s practice began as an intensely personal investigation of changing familial relationships within the framework of the discovery and articulation of sexuality, but later expanded to incorporate the use of outwardly disparate socio-political, cultural and historical events in order to draw parallels and highlight disjuncture. Rizvi is engaged with the vocabulary of loss and absence, difference and dislocation, within the sphere of an increasingly open-ended approach spanning a variety of technical methodologies. His work initiates a dialogue that is intensely personal, yet also pluralistic, questioning notions of identity, memory and erasure.

The exegesis of Rizvi’s work for the Karachi Biennale 2017, Kedgeree, lies in the artist’s introspective investigation into his formative years, from a linguistic standpoint. Beginning as an exploration of language politics within his own trajectory, the basis of which being his predominately Urdu-speaking familial background, the work transcends Rizvi’s individual concern, becoming a collection of visual metaphors which delineate the role that language plays in establishing and preserving class-divides. Displaying his multi-disciplinary approach, Rizvi utilises a variety of media as component parts within a minimalist aesthetic framework to play with the notions of exclusion, division, accessibility and social mobility that are inherent within the landscape of a post-colonial society, through the scope of their linguistic manifestations.