Hurmat Ul Ain/Rabbya Naseer

Born in 1984 in Islamabad (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Islamabad (Pakistan)

Hurmat Ul Ain is an interdisciplinary artist and art educationist. Her work is performative in nature and deals with concerns relating to body, gender, food, hospitality and service. She has a BFA from National College of Arts in Painting (2006) and an MFA in Performance Art from School of Art Institute Chicago (2011) where she was studying as a Fulbright Scholar. Ain has been teaching, building curriculum and curating structures for academic archiving at School of Art, Design and Architecture (NUST) in Islamabad since 2011. She has authored published works in journals pertaining to art and design pedagogy in Pakistan and also practices related to visual and culinary arts. Her work has been shown in the US, UK, India, China, Dubai, Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, Germany and Pakistan.

Hurmat Ul Ain writes of her performance with Rabbya Naseer for KB17: “The audience is invited for a sensorial experience as Naseer and Ain shed tears and share intimate stories over the course of a long durational performance. The chopping of onions, a mundane and domestic task, is accompanied by story-telling as a distraction, but also as a reward, for bearing the sting. The work is durational and may be experienced at any moment in time depending on the endurance of the audience.”