Muhammad Ali

Born in 1988 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Muhammad Ali is a multidisciplinary visual artist who graduated in 2010 from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Ali has exhibited in Pakistan and abroad with several solo and multi-person shows to his credit. He exhibited at the Bruckenthal Museum of Contemporary Art in Romania and made it as a finalist in the Sovereign Asian Art Prize and was subsequently shown in Hong Kong and South Korea. He was part of a seminal show of Pakistani artists in Dubai’s leading Lawrie Shabibi Gallery. He has recently shown in the US as well. Muhammad Ali thinks of himself as an artist of the senses who likes to manipulate, coax, create and render whole metaphysical and literal worlds of fantasy. By profession, he is a creator, an inventor and an artist, but more importantly it is his skill with emotion and what he calls his “desire radar" that allows him to flesh out ideas and engage in a meaningful dialogue.

For KB17, Muhamnmad Ali has created an installation involving the repeated image of twin elephants on the stage of the auditorium of Jamshed Memorial Hall. He writes of this work, and his accompanying performance: “The theatre and its twin dichotomies of tragedy and comedy, which encompass all the elements of human emotion as well as layers of personas which constitute our ‘realities’ is a significant inspiration. All the polarities of emotion such as compulsion and revulsion, alienation and acceptance, dreams and waking fantasies, are addressed in a manner that evokes mythological archetypes, presented as re-tellings in a critical manner.” The artist has also conceived of a separate performance for KB17, which will, in the words of the artist, “revolve around the ideas of cleanliness, purity and impurity, obsession and catharsis.”