Muhammad Arslan Farooqi

Born in 1992 in Faisalabad (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Muhammad Arslan Farooqi is a Lahore-based artist, illustrator and animator. He obtained his BFA (with Distinction) from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2016. His works have been featured at several group exhibitions nationally, at venues including: Gandhara Art Space, Karachi; Canvas Gallery, Karachi; Sanat Gallery, Karachi; IVS Gallery, Karachi; Studio Seven, Karachi; Zahoor ul Ikhlaq Gallery, Lahore; and at the Karachi Literary Festival, 2016. His art practice aims to amalgamate art, illustration and animation, breathing life into previously fixed and static media.

Farooqui’s series of works for the Karachi Biennale 2017 translates Mughal miniature paintings into a series of digital animations, and one accompanying, life-size sculpture. The artist’s intention was to identify the tone and trajectory of action in each of these artworks, which depict moments suspended for eternity, and then reanimate them in an aesthetic style reminiscent of the Italian ‘Commedia dell’arte’ puppetry. In doing so, Farooqi has heightened the emotional response of the viewer to the actions of the work, almost as if the viewer has been transported to the time in which these works created, reimagining the elevated impact that each miniature painting would have had on its contemporaneous audience.