Rabbya Naseer

Born in 1984 in Rawalpindi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Rabbya Naseer is a Lahore-based artist, curator, writer, critic and teacher. Her practice is broadly concerned with exploring the parallels between art and everyday life, highlighting their similarities in production, representation, reception, and interpretation. She views herself as a facilitator in the realm of cultural production, orchestrating situations of discourse and reciprocity through a variety of mediums and disciplines. With a keen interest in performative art, Naseer examines how encounters with the commonplace can spur the process of artistic creation. She obtained her Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore (2006), and was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship for her Master’s in Art Theory and Criticism from SAIC, Chicago (2008-2010). She has participated in exhibitions, residencies and conferences in Pakistan, India, USA, UK, Dubai, China, Japan, Germany, Netherlands and Australia.

Naseer’s video work for the Karachi Biennale is part of her ongoing project that aims to develop an archive of Pakistani performance art. Her project investigates the many unique aspects and challenges imbued within the discipline of performative art; the ephemeral nature of a performance piece entails the necessity for photographic or video documentation, yet this residual evidence can never appropriately capture the experiential and sensory nature of the work for a member of the audience. Neither can this documentation fully describe the context of the performance, time and space being essential aspects in its realisation. However, without such recordings, and their compilation in an archive, the only remaining testimony of the work comes from the highly subjective perspective of the viewers, and the artist themselves, which must come in the form of mandatory ekphrasis. Naseer’s project examines the divergent, often oppositional aspects that constitute a performative piece of art. Naseer explains the thematic relevance of her project: “The Karachi Bienniale’s theme is closely aligned with the subject of my project. It’s a perfect setting to share a few works through a form that aims to explore the role of the ‘witness’ in relation to performance art.” Rabbya Naseer’s collaborative performance with Hurmat Ul Ain, Dropping Tears Together II, is also part of the Karachi biennale 2017.