2017 Karachi Biennale Artists

Sohail Zuberi

Born in 1970 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

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Sohail Zuberi

Born in 1970 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Sohail Zuberi is a graphic designer, photographer and visual artist based in Karachi. He graduated from the Karachi School of Art in 1992. Along with his independent practice, Zuberi has been associated with academia for the past sixteen years. He was the head of the Communication Design department at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture 2012-2015, and has taught design, fine art and photography at the University of Karachi and the Textile Institute of Pakistan. Zuberi is also a former trustee of Vasl Artists’ Collective. Currently, he is a core team member of Numaish-Karachi, an interdisciplinary art collective, and serves on the board of Pakistan Chowk Cultural Centre, Karachi.

Sohail Zuberi writes of his installation for KB17: “Across decades, Karachi has undergone (and continually endures) a radical and mostly unplanned modification into a megalopolis. The desultory expansion leaves limited to no opportunities and amenities to accommodate its surging inhabitants, who in the face of which consequentially adapt to the domestic constraints and exploit the everyday dynamics to their advantage. By investigating the contextually extracted concept of 'adapters' and ‘exploiters’2, I amplify narratives on Karachi's ceaselessly revised physiognomy, and extrapolate the parallels between the human and animal species that are settled in — and are manoeuvring  — this urban sprawl.”

 

 

Makaan/Ghar (House/Home), 2017.
Mixed media installation
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist

Sonia Khurana

Born in 1968 in Saharanpur (India)
Lives and works in New Delhi (India)

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Sonia Khurana

Born in 1968 in Saharanpur (India)
Lives and works in New Delhi (India)

Sonia Khurana works with lens based media, moving image, performance, text, drawing, sound, and installation. Often using the performative mode, she structures the self through states of strangeness, alienation, displacement, interiority and embodiment. Placing the body in an oblique relation to diffused feminist aesthetics of the counter-spectacle and performative resistance, she strives to engage with the constant negotiations between body and language, the self and the world. Through these deliberately poetic intimations, she tries to persistently explore and re-define the space of the political. Sonia Khurana studied art in London at the Royal College of Art, where she completed her Masters in 1999, and earlier in Delhi, at the Delhi College of Art. In 2002, Sonia did a two-year Residency Programme for practice-based research at the Rijksakademie VBK in Amsterdam. Her works have been shown and collected internationally. Group shows include: Exhibitions elles@Centre Pompidou (2009/2010),  Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum (2007), the Aichi Triennale [2010], the Gwangju Biennale [2008], West Heavens [2010], Sculpture Motion, Wanas Konst, Sweden [May to Nov 2017] Her solo expositions, include: “Lone Women Don’t Lie,” (2000), “Many Lives” (2006), “Still/Moving Image (2007), “Living in the Round,” (2009), “Oneiric House: Round About Midnight” (2014) and most recently, “Fold/Unfold” (2017).

Sonia Khurana writes of her video film installation on view at KB17: “The World is a series of images and text, poetic meanderings on the theme of home, homelessness and living between places; my own poetic meanderings on the theme often resonate with other, existing thoughts and texts and experiences, most of all those of my grandmother’s.”

I’m Tied to My Mother’s Womb with A Very Long Chord, 1998.
Two channel video installation
Color, silent. 5:00 min. looped. Hi-8 transferred to SD.

Sonya Battla

Born in 1971 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

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Sonya Battla

Born in 1971 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Sonya Battla was born and raised in Karachi and studied Fashion in London.  She established her eponymous label in 2000. She lives and works from her studio in Karachi. Sonya Battla tends to embrace the negative space as fondly as the positive of the image. She is especially interested in the human form and its correlation to movement and effects of that space created.

Sonya Battla writes of her installation for KB17: “This work is about the shelter a home provides, in contrast with how the destruction of a home creates refugees for whom a roof becomes more than that.”

Untitled, 2017.
Wood, bandages, found objects
Dimensions variable

Sophia Balagamwala

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

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Sophia Balagamwala

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

Sophia Balagamwala is a Karachi-based artist, illustrator and curator. Her work draws from history, children’s books, political caricatures and animated films. She currently works at the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, and is the Lead Curator for National History Museum at the Greater Iqbal Park, Lahore. Her artistic practice explores the intersectional space in which history, fiction and nonsense converge. This derives from her interest in how stories are constructed, in particular, the myths of national heroes and national histories, and how these embody a subjective dialogue between so-called historical reality, apocrypha and mythification. These concerns find their way into Balagamwala’s practice through a visual language inspired by children’s books and political caricatures.

Hopes and Prospects epitomizes Balagamwala’s artistic practice, by presenting various caricatured candidates to the audience, each of whom is running to be elected as head of a fictional state. She presents each candidate in a gaudy television set, which seems to have come straight off the pages of an illustrated children’s book, creating a visual representation of each candidate’s ‘soap-box’. Balagamwala aptly describes the beauty and danger of caricature: “The humour of the caricature, in addition to acting as a metaphor and carrying a history of political critique can be deeply complex. Things have the liberty to get carried away, and to become abstracted and nonsensical.” The artist’s work for the Karachi Biennale masterfully walks this artistic tightrope, as each of the candidates present their hopes for the nation – but to the audience, these caricatures expounding their political spiel from their soapbox all sound interchangeable. The satirical brilliance of this sculptural caricature is that these candidates, their interchangeability and their meaningless rhetoric, seem all too familiar in our disillusionary contemporary political context.

Hopes and Prospects, 2017.
Fiberglass, wood, enamel and animations with audio on a loop
Courtesy the artist

Stephen Sheehan

Born in 1986 in Birkenhead (UK)
Lives and works in Birkenhead (UK)

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Stephen Sheehan

Born in 1986 in Birkenhead (UK)
Lives and works in Birkenhead (UK)

Stephen Sheehan graduated from Wirral Metropolitan College obtaining a first class honours degree in Fine Art in 2014. In 2016, he obtained an MA in Fine Art at John Moores University at Distinction Level. During his MA, Sheehan was nominated and selected as a Liverpool Biennial Associate Artist, a two-year programme that aims to support and develop the career of northern artists on an international level. Sheehan predominately works with film, performance and video. He has a particular interest in exploring human mortality and repetition.

Sheehan has submitted two videos for the 2017 Karachi Biennale. The first, Parrot Reflection, is a film he created during a one-month residency at ALN in Albany, New York, USA in 2016. Parrot Reflection depicts the moment when a character wearing a hat (played by Sheehan) discovers his reflection in a mirror that he finds in the snow. The film then proceeds to capture various characters as they find themselves in questioning conversations with their own physical reflections within an absurd world. Sheehan used Averill Park, a hamlet in rural New York, as a backdrop for the film while blending real life situations with filmed performances, allowing both fantasy and reality to merge. The work comments upon existence, morality and the self. The second video, titled Cambrian Explosion: I Arrived at the Circus at Two Minutes Past Eight, is a new film created specifically for KB17 during a one-month residency in Karachi with Vasl Artists’ Association. Making reference to the brief of Sight, Sheehan refers back to the Cambrian Explosion as a foundation for the film. The Cambrian Explosion was a period in time when sight first developed allowing life to flourish. Sheehan transforms and places the Cambrian Explosion into modern day society while exploring and presenting the absurd, beautiful, fragile and transient existence we find ourselves in. Stephen Sheehan will also be doing a performative work for the Karachi Biennale 2017.

Still from Parrot Reflection, 2016.
Single channelled video, 14:22 min.
Courtesy the artist

Stephen Slappe

Born in 1973 in Charleston, WV (USA)
Lives and works in Portland, OR (USA)

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Stephen Slappe

Born in 1973 in Charleston, WV (USA)
Lives and works in Portland, OR (USA)

Stephen Slappe is an artist and educator based in Portland, Oregon, USA. Slappe states this about his practice: “Using video, sound, installation, and interactivity, I playfully dismantle and rebuild images in an effort to understand their meaning and power. Recently, my practice has been centered on establishing alternative models of education built around increasing media literacy and introducing the tools of media production to underserved communities.” His work has been exhibited and screened in venues such as Centre Pompidou-Metz, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's Time-based Art Festival, The Transart Trienniale (Berlin), The Horse Hospital (London), The Sarai Media Lab (New Delhi), Consolidated Works (Seattle), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), and Artists Television Access (San Francisco). Slappe is an Associate Professor at Pacific Northwest College of Art where he heads the Video & Sound department. His most recent projects include an immersive iOS app entitled 8, available on iTunes and Future Forum, an experimental education program at Open Signal, a community media center in Portland, OR.

Part short film, part game, and part video installation, 8 is an iOS app that places users in the middle of an immersive video environment where physically moving your device reveals events unfolding and repeating around you. Users can wander through a maze of 24 looping scenes by simply tapping the screen. Navigation symbols can be used to learn patterns of movement through the app but there is no real beginning or end. 8 was designed as a kind of anti-app in that it emphasizes physical space and movement while frustrating the user's desire to have complete control over the direction of their on-screen experience.

8 (version 1.2), 2015.
iOS app, dimensions variable, duration variable
Courtesy the artist

Sungjin Song

Born in 1974 in Busan (South Korea)
Lives and works in Busan (South Korea)

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Sungjin Song

Born in 1974 in Busan (South Korea)
Lives and works in Busan (South Korea)

Sungjin Song explores the habitat and lifestyles of urban dwellers through photography, installation, video and interactive art. Through his work, he chronicles urban change and how the structuring and restructuring of cities impact their citizens. Song completed a PhD course at Busan National University. Since then, he has had 11 solo shows and participated in numerous group shows, both in Korea and abroad. He has also coordinated public art projects in different countries, including projects at the Museum of Kaohsiung/Taiwan, ARKO Museum, Gwangju Museum of Art and the Busan Museum of Art.

Recently, in Berlin, Song initiated a project called “Postures,” which investigates the posture/posturing of people in the private and public space. He will bring this project to Karachi and some of the work he documents there will become part of the Biennale. Of his work on view at KB17, Song states: “Suppose a virtual city has things in common with a real one, then make people who live in an actual city play a game which is very simple and physical, like hanging onto a horizontal bar or standing on a balancing beam all together at the same time. I then capture their collective postures in photographs and on video. The aggregate of images confronts the viewer with people from different backgrounds all engaged in a single activity. The question is: will the viewer be able to identify who is who? The exercise is intended to make us think of our perpetual efforts to move forward and keep our balance; of why we keep on doing this; and of what we feel about the present.”

 

Postures-Hang on, Balance, 2017.
Digital print, photo installation
90 x 250 cm.

Syed Ammad Tahir

Born in 1986 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

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Syed Ammad Tahir

Born in 1986 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Syed Ammad Tahir graduated from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in 2008 with a Bachelor’s in Fine Art. He has had one solo exhibition at the Goethe-Institut, Karachi and has participated in several group exhibitions in Pakistan and abroad including “And Nothing but the Truth: the Problem of Parrhesia,” curated by Zarmeené Shah at Koel Gallery, Karachi, as well as several performance-based exhibitions at the Amin Gulgee Gallery, Karachi. His work was nominated for the Rangoonwala Thesis Scholarship and the Zahoor ul Akhlaque Drawing Portfolio Award. Tahir reviews exhibitions and regularly writes for the Herald (Pakistan). He has taught drawing in the Department of Fine Art at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture from 2009 – 2012, and at Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s Institute of Science and Technology from 2010 – 2014, and taught History of Art at the Textile Institute of Pakistan in 2012. He is now a Lecturer in the Department of Communication Design at IVS. Tahir was recently nominated as an exchange scholar by the US State Department to teach drawing and 2D Design at Kennesaw State University, Atlanta, USA.

Of his work for KB17, Syed Ammad Tahir writes: “Talk to Me is a performance work which will take place in real-time at one of the venues of the Karachi Biennale through live streaming of the performance via laptop and a projector/LCD screen. The artist will be streaming from an unknown location for three hours and will remain open to answering non-scripted questions by the audience during the entire stream of the performance. The performance relives the moments of cyber chat that I had with strangers during my teenage years and will allow the strangers / audience visiting the biennale to become part of my virtual fantasy.”

Talk to Me, 2017.
Live video stream, 180 min.

Syed Jamal Shah

Born in 1956 in Quetta (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Islamabad (Pakistan)

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Syed Jamal Shah

Born in 1956 in Quetta (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Islamabad (Pakistan)

Syed Jamal Shah is an artist, writer, filmmaker, educationist and social worker. He completed his Master’s in English literature from Balochistan University and joined the National College of Arts, Lahore, where he was the first to major in Sculpture. Upon completing his degree there, Shah returned to Quetta, where he set up the Department of Fine Arts at Balochistan University. He chaired the department for three years and then went on a British Council scholarship to do a Master’s in printmaking from The Slade School of Arts, London. Trained in various disciplines of Visual Arts, his forte remains sculpture. He has been a prolific artist throughout his career and has exhibited widely in Pakistan and internationally. He is the recipient of many awards including the Gold Medal at the 5th Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka. His work is part of the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and Fukouka Museum, Japan. He has done many important commissioned projects in Pakistan and abroad. In addition, Shah founded the Hunerkada Art Academy in Islamabad and has been Director General of the Pakistan National Council of the Arts.

For KB17, Syed Jamal Shah has created a 25-foot metallic cage with wings surrounded by a number of life-size human figures cast in various materials and installed at Frere Hall, a central Karachi location. The surfaces of the sculptures have been treated in a variety of media. The installation also includes: two large LED screens for video projection of performances; a poetry recital by renowned media personalities/actors; dance by Amna Mawaz and the NPAG group of PNCA; music by Sain Khawar and Ustad Hamid Shahid and Faqirs from Sindh; as well as live painting and graffiti during the dance performances. The work invites a cross-disciplinary interactivity and engages other important artists from different disciplines including students and art enthusiasts in performances that will simultaneously be video recorded and projected. Syed Jamal Shah writes, “SITUATION 101 is a major art project specially executed for Karachi Biennale 2017 with the thematic area witness in mind. The work is a playful comment on the dichotomy of freedom, un-freedom Inviting interactivity, questions and interpretations. Being based on the eternal paradox of the cage within, invisible cage or the relativity of freedom and free will, the project wishes to initiate a dialogue on several levels. At one level It is about subjugation, submission and dehumanization; on others it reflects hope, dreams and the human struggle for liberation and situations in life that might have encouraged human beings to engage with life intimately in a creative and critical manner thereby triggering evolution and change. It is also about the inborn need of humankind to connect despite ironies, absurdities and playfulness from ancient history to living cultures with esthetic crossovers. SITUATION 101 as an art activity also questions the essence of art as a vehicle for change and esthetic decision-making. It is as much about the function of art as it is about the art object which is why it presents itself to be a non-museum work that seeks spontaneous interaction with people.”

SITUATION 101, 2017.
Sight-specific project of sculptural Installation involving 101 sculptures, performance, poetry, music and video projections

Syed Safdar Ali

Born in 1983 in Tando Jam (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

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Syed Safdar Ali

Born in 1983 in Tando Jam (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Syed Safdar Ali received his BFA (with Distinction) from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2014. His work has been exhibited widely in Pakistan, at venues including: Gandhara Art Space, Karachi; Pioneer Cement Plant, Jouharabad; Canvas Gallery, Karachi; IVS Gallery, Karachi; Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery, Lahore; Satrang Gallery, Islamabad; Full Cirlce Gallery, Karachi; and 39k Gallery, Lahore. His art practice explores, in the widest sense, the human being’s inability to identify with the structures that we, ourselves, created. Ali elaborates: “My work takes as its starting point the contradiction between our distrust of social structures and our desire to fit into them.”

Ali’s sculptural installation for the Karachi Biennale 2017 creates a visual metaphor representing the rigid social structures in which we inhabit in our daily existence, by constructing a cage-like cubic structure from crutches, a symbol of the commonplace. Ali’s choice to use crutches to create this structure, not only symbolizes the commonplace; it represents the injurious nature of these societally-dictated structures on our psyche, capturing the sense of inadequacy that we feel when confronting these clearly defined societal and cultural boundaries and norms. The paradox embedded in Ali’s work is that whilst we need the crutches to remain standing, they prevent our free-mobility; a manifestation of our purgatorial reliance on, and resentment of, societal structures.

Crutches
366 x 244 x 244 cm.

Syed Yasir Husain

Born in 1971 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

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Syed Yasir Husain

Born in 1971 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Yasir Husain is a Karachi-based artist, urban farmer and environmentalist. His artistic practice revolves around the consistent baseline of an environmental thematic, engaging with this through electronic media and new technologies. The contextual stage on which he plays out this conceptual dialogue comprises of, according to Husain: “cultural change; intellectual rubble; global, personal and social media apparatus; hyper-information; and the continuing impacts of globalisation, urbanisation and the omnipotence of the internet.” A graduate from The City University of New York and the University of Rochester (U.S.), he has participated in numerous national and international art gatherings and exhibitions, including: Colomboscope (Sri Lanka); Karachi Art Summit; Numaish Karachi; the International Symposium in Electronic Arts (UAE); Khatmandu International Arts Festival (Nepal); the Tashkent Biennale (Uzbekistan); Ars Electronica (Austria); and Transmediale (Germany). He currently operates, and is a founding member of, multiple projects in Karachi: the Mauj Collective; ArtLab, an experimental project which combines art with technology; and Organic City, which promotes environmental sustainability and ‘green living’, and through these are run various subsidiary projects, primarily educational in nature.

Implosive Karachi exemplifies Husain’s technological approach to the process of artistic creation. In a partially performative piece, he has utilised live-streaming and a 360° camera to act as a wandering witness to the frenetic and chaotic environment that is the urbanity of Karachi. The roving camera will stream its vision of the city back onto a screen at the NJV School creating a continuously shifting discourse between the viewer and the viewed; the exhibition space and the urban space; the city and the Biennale. This is furthered by the fact that the marauding live-stream shall also navigate its way around the Karachi Biennale’s other venues, creating meta-exhibitions as it traverses each space and beams back its vision, allowing for the opportunity for KB17 to have a virtual tour of its venues posted on the internet for global consumption.

Implosive Karachi, 2017.
Live video stream, 360° camera, mobile locations in Karachi
The duration of the Karachi Biennale 2017.

Tabita Rezaire

Born in 1989 in Paris (France)
Lives and works in Johannesburg (South Africa)

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Tabita Rezaire

Born in 1989 in Paris (France)
Lives and works in Johannesburg (South Africa)

Tabita Rezaire is a French – of Guyanese/Danish descent – video artist, health-tech-politics practitioner and Kemetic/Kundalini yoga teacher based in Johannesburg. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics (Paris) and a master’s degree in artist moving image from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (London). Rezaire is a founding member of the artist group NTU, half of the duo Malaxa, and mother of the energy house SENEB. Artsy declared Rezaire among the “emerging artists to watch for in 2017,” Artnet among the “international Black artists of 2016,” and True Africa amid the “top opinion makers of the African continent in 2015”. In 2017, she presented her first solo show, Exotic Trade, at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg. Her work has been shown internationally – notably at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the National Gallery of Denmark, the Berlin Biennale, the Tate Modern (London), the Museum of Modern Art (Paris), MoCADA (New York City), and The Broad (Los Angeles). She has also presented her work on numerous panels – Het Nieuwe Institut (Rotterdam), the Royal Academy (The Hague), the Kunsthalle (Bern), the National Gallery (Harare), Cairotronica (Cairo), Fakugezi Digital Art Africa (Johannesburg). Rezaire has curated screenings at the Institute of Contemporary Art (London), led spiritual technology workshops worldwide, and seen her writing published by Intellect books. Tabita Rezaire’s practice unearths the possibilities of decolonial healing through the politics of technology. Navigating architectures of power – online and offline – her works tackle the pervasive matrix of coloniality and its effects on identity, technology, sexuality, health and spirituality. Through screen interfaces, her digital healing activism offers substitute readings to dominant narratives, decentering occidental authority.

Inner Fire is a series of life-size digital self-portrait collages exploring the politics of the artist’s identities, aspirations and contradictions. The images respectively embody an archetype of the black woman in regard to race, sex, spirituality, technology and capital, mapping how those narratives affect her own as well as collective imaginaries and identities.

Inner Fire – Shadeliscious
Diesec print, 170 x 100 cm.
Edition of 5
© Tabita Rezaire
Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Curated by SPARCK.

Talal Faisal

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

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Talal Faisal

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

Talal Faisal is an emerging artist based in Lahore. He received his early education at Aitchison College, Lahore and then graduated with honors from the School of Visual Arts at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore in 2016. He has taken part in group exhibitions in Karachi.

Talal Faisal has two works on view at KB17. In one he has constructed toys from wheat, speaking to the recent proliferation of Chinese-made soft toys in the markets and roadside stalls of Pakistan. In this installation, the artist wishes to address the successive legacies of British, American and Chinese influence in his country. He writes: “Chinese toys displayed in wheat is a satirical take on the dominance of a superpower on a Third World agrarian economy already battling with food insecurity. Wheat is an important signifier in this case.”

One Belt, One Road, 2017.
Mixed media installation
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist

Tazeen Qayyum

Born in 1973 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Oakville, ON (Canada)

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Tazeen Qayyum

Born in 1973 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Oakville, ON (Canada)

Tazeen Qayyum is a contemporary visual artist who received her BFA in Visual Arts from the National College of Arts Lahore, Pakistan in 1996. Her work has been shown internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, some of which include ‘Holding Pattern’ at the Toronto Pearson Airport, 'The Veiled' at the Textile Museum of Canada, 'The Rising Tide’, Mohatta Palace Museum, Pakistan, ‘Urban Myths & Modern Fables’, University of Sydney, Australia and UTSC, Toronto, ‘A Thousand and One Days’ at the Academy of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii, ‘JAALA Exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Japan, ‘Homecoming’, at the National Gallery of Pakistan and 'CodeLive Metro' at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. She was nominated for the Jameel Prize (2013) and K.M. Hunter Award (2014), and received the Excellence in Art Award 2015 by the CCAI (Canadian Community Arts Initiative). Qayyum's work was included in the 10th Asian Biennale, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2002), 2nd Painting Biennale, Tehran, Iran (2002) and was awarded a UNESCO bursary (2000) to work and exhibit in Vienna.

Of her work for KB17, Tazeen Qayyum states: “Facade is a site-responsive immersive installation that takes the Karachi Biennial’s theme ‘Witness’ and asks how we as a Pakistani society have become desensitized to the growing violence, intolerance and prejudice and how such actions are mimicking and reflecting the growing western rhetoric of non-inclusive religious ideas and insolence towards other faiths. Installed at the historic and important site of Jamshed Memorial Hall in Karachi, which houses the Theosophical Society, Facade is an outward exploration of the ideology and teachings of the society which is based on universal brotherhood (without distinction of race or colour) and to encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy and science. Taking advantage of the site’s architectural history, function, and the survival history of the Society in the community, the front façade of the building is delicately painted with ornate pattern of interlocking shapes of a household cockroach. The resulting installation not only masks the building under an ornate veil of grotesque beauty, it also mirrors the environment, engaging passers-by with wonder and curiosity. The painted pattern pays homage to the exquisite tile work on religious structures, graffiti art and wall chalking whereas its subtle macabre humour, engages the audience to ponder meaning of inclusion, tolerance, hope and resilience. The repeated forms and the message of Façade that are observed as outward communal engagement is then witnessed in the drawing based performance Unvoiced, as an inward expression of meaningful reconciliation and endless compassion.”

Façade, 2017.
Site-responsive Installation

Thomas C. Chung

Born in 1981 in Hong Kong
Lives and works in Sydney (Australia)

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Thomas C. Chung

Born in 1981 in Hong Kong
Lives and works in Sydney (Australia)

Born in Hong Kong in 1981, Thomas C. Chung is an Australian artist, based in Sydney. In 2004, Chung completed his BFA at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales. Since 2008, Chung has exhibited in twelve solo exhibitions, and participated in the 2nd Land Art Biennial Mongolia. In 2013, he was invited to the prestigious artist’s residency The Swatch Art Peace Hotel. In 2015, he completed a commissioned artwork for Swatch® to commemorate their Swatch® Club 25th Anniversary. He was also recently invited to represent Australia at the 4th Ghetto Biennale in Haiti, the 9th Shiryaevo Biennale in Russia, and the 3rd Santorini Biennale in Greece. His work is included in various private collections internationally. For the past ten years, he has received numerous artist residencies, travelling to Kemijärvi (Finland), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Shanghai (China) and Zürich (Switzerland). His work has been featured widely in both print and online publications, including: The Daily Telegraph; Australian Art Collector; Yen Magazine; Göteborgs-Posten; Helsingborgs Dagblad; Lapin Kansa; Shanghai Daily; The Bund Magazine; The Huffington Post; and Vanity Fair. On the subject of his artistic practice, Chung states: “My artistic practice is about seeing the world through the eyes of a child, having dealt with their dreams and anxieties in previous years - food, toys, paintings, drawings and installations being the mediums which I have used… Furthering my practice with performances, the knitted objects that are created and used are seen as a motif, representing a specific gesture. Each documented series provides an insight into the human condition, traversing history, landscape and culture.”

Chung delineates the praxis of hid performative work for the Karachi Biennale 2017, What We Left Behind…, “Inspired by an image of a Pakistani attendant named Omera, her gesture of handing out bonbons to orphaned children in Karachi was most heartening. Relaying this conceptual piece from afar I’ll be presenting 100 knitted white candies to commemorate this narrative, my artwork being part sculpture and part performance.” Seen as a sign of kindness and a gesture of openness, these knitted white candies represent a child-like point of view, where a gift is seen as a willingness to receive friendship. The whiteness of the objects is a poignant reminder of innocence and wonder in a world that is often dark and breeds cynicism.

 

 

 

 

What We Left Behind…, 2017.
Sculptural performance (yarn, acrylic stuffing & documented photos)
Variable duration

Umber Majeed

Born in 1989 in New York (USA)
Lives and works between New York and Lahore (Pakistan)

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Umber Majeed

Born in 1989 in New York (USA)
Lives and works between New York and Lahore (Pakistan)

Umber Majeed completed her MFA from Parsons The New School for Design in 2016, having graduated from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan in 2013. Majeed has shown in venues throughout the world, including: The Slought Foundation, Philadelphia; Shirin Gallery, New York; The State Hermitage Museum, St.Petersburg; Queens Museum, New York; and apexart, New York. Her work has been acquired by several private collections, including the Lekha and Anupam Poddar Collection at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, India, and she recently completed the HWP fellowship at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, Lebanon. Majeed’s interdisciplinary practice is conceptually driven by physical and cultural displacement; and characterised by multi-cultural experience. As a result, her work is a manifestation of cultural hybridity, engaging with discourses surrounding migration, post-colonial confusion and definitions of political contentiousness. The fragmented perspective conspicuous within Majeed’s drawings, collages, and animations depicts the complexity of cultural identity, and the accompanying burden of misconception.

Atomi Daamaki Wali Mohabbat, Majeed’s work for the Karachi Biennale 2017, is an animation that chronicles the history of nuclear power in Pakistan compiled through national and familial archives. The disjointed and uncomfortable aesthetic perfectly dissects the history of nuclear testing in Pakistan, with Majeed using Chagi Monument Hill as a visual motif within a digital space to constitute a poignant moment in history. She furthers this by utilising flora as a symbolic representation of embedded violence, subverted by the hegemonic narration of a fictitious populist Urdu poet.

 

Still from Atomi Daamaki Wali Mohabbat (The Atomically Explosive Love), 2017.
Animation, 30 min.
Courtesy the artist

Umberto Zampini

Born in 1958 in Occhiobello (Italy)
Lives and works in Venice (Italy)

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Umberto Zampini

Born in 1958 in Occhiobello (Italy)
Lives and works in Venice (Italy)

Umberto Zampini is an artist, photographer, curator, publisher, clandestine traveler and Venetian. He has lived many years in various Italian, European and US locations. Before returning to Venice a few years ago, he lived among wolves and wild boars on top of a hill between Modena and Bologna. He travels incessantly, photographing, through the Po Valley, avoiding crossing the Ticino River. He first published his photographs in the magazine AD Italy in 1983.

Umberto Zampini has on view at KB17 work from two of his series of photographs: Shift on a Plain (2016) and A Mile Around (2014). The first comprises photographs taken from a train window. He writes: “Space designed by movement, signs that remain impressed in the traveler's memory. Those for whom the destination does not count, but whose final aim is the actual journey. The underlying interest is in the clear and distant time-spaces, and the sudden elusive and confused nearby apparitions within them. The calligraphies of speed hence provide new insightful perceptions into the apparent immobility of the plain where my grandparents lived…These photographs have been voluntarily printed on poster paper to maintain their window-like nature onto the world. They are two dimensional, almost immaterial openings in the walls that always surround us. Through them appear sudden trees, dusk, disappearing fields swallowed by the fast pace of our lives.” The second series comprises black-and-white photographs placed within small black boxes. The photographs were taken within a one-mile radius of the gallery in Modena, Italy where they were later exhibited. Zampini writes: “Modena is a sunny and cheerful city where life is enjoyable. I dug deep into her inner fears: and a darker city was drawn through my lens and came to life. People did not recognize the roads they had walked to come visit the exhibition. They did not know where the photos were taken; almost fearing to recognize their beloved city. I'm not a photo reporter: I use photography to paint what the eye does not see; the mind’s eye.”

A Mile Around Modena, 2014.
Photographs, wooden boxes

Umme Farwa

Born in 1990 in Lahore (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

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Umme Farwa

Born in 1990 in Lahore (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Umme Farwa graduated with distinction from Beaconhouse National University, Lahore in 2014 with a degree in Visual Arts. She is currently pursuing her Master’s in Multimedia Arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore. Her art practice is mostly performance and video based.

Umme Farwa writes of one of her two performative works for KB17: “My performance will take place in front of a white wall. I plan to ‘prepare’ the wall with the help of an aluminum folding ladder, recreating a perfect page from a school notebook. I will draw all the margins and lines and decorate the page with a pretty border bringing it to a stage where it is ready to be written upon. Then I will leave it be: an empty, perfect page. Without any content, the page, however perfect it may be, is rendered useless.”

 

 

Untiled, 2017.
Performance

Unver Shafi Khan

Born in 1961 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

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Unver Shafi Khan

Born in 1961 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Unver Shafi Khan set up his studio in Karachi in 1984 after returning from Kenyon College, USA with a BA in English Literature. His first solo show, in 1986, was at the Indus Gallery run by the iconic Ali Imam. This came about because of a meeting at the gallery with the late Dr Akbar Naqvi, F.N. Souza and Ali Imam. At that time, Unver met sporadically with Amin Gulgee, Durriya Kazi, Huma Bhaba, Naiza Khan, Elizabeth and Iftikhar Dadi, David Alesworth and Moeen Faruqi, as well as with Ardy Cowasjee, who opened the short-lived but influential Ziggurat Gallery in Karachi. It was in these early years that the artist also befriended the late Zahoor ul Alkhlaq, who stayed with him and worked in his studio towards his first show at Ziggurat. And the rest, Unver says, “is history.”

Unver Shafi Khan has created a giclee print on canvas based on a painting in acrylic for KB17. The image is of a large pink pig. Art critic Saquif Hanif has written of the artist and his oeuvre: “If the larger oil paintings are exercises in virtuosity and control and hinged mostly on solitary forms, the meticulously observed acrylic ‘miniatures’ collectively titled as the Fabulist series [as in taking inspiration from traditional fables] use a striking jewel-like visual narrative full of sexual wit and innuendo. This narrative content is drawn from a host of arts and crafts traditions and these paintings provide a sense of looking past the edge of the ordinary world into the domain of the phantasmagoric. Those made uncomfortable by the ostensible disjunction between Unver’s large work and these miniature scaled paintings need not be unduly alarmed as they share a common pictorial ethos. It is all there for the main part-the choice of the human figure as the basic unit of art, the saturation of colour, the mastery of rhythm, the sexuality, the relentless sense of fun- the only difference being one of scale and technique. The paintings in both mediums are profligate in their wholesale abandonment to feelings and flat-out appeal to the senses.”

HOLY SHIT!, 2017.
Giclee print on canvas and reworked again
183 x 137 cm.
Courtesy the artist

Vera Herr

Born in 1988 in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany)
Lives and works in Berlin (Germany)

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Vera Herr

Born in 1988 in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany)
Lives and works in Berlin (Germany)

Vera Herr is a German filmmaker and video artist. Currently, she works as a freelance editor and artist in Berlin and Brussels. Herr works at the intersection of experimental, documentary and fictional films, presented as single screens or shown in the context of an installation. Her films have been shown internationally at film festivals, including EMAF, European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, and KuFF 'Kumu Art Film Festival' in Tallin. She obtained her M.A. in Audio­Visual Arts at the Sint­Lukas School of Arts in Brussels. Her B.A. graduation project “Swimming Nude” won the Department Prize and got an honourable mention at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (NL) in 2013. In 2011, she lived and studied for one year in Jerusalem at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.

Of her work on view at KB17, Vera Herr sates: “The film director accompanies the person in front of the camera through the forgotten corridors of their personality. The ‘Scream Test’ reveals a pre­historic instinct and innate experience through the performer's body. The scream is a personal release: it actualizes the presence of aggression, touching upon the dimension of collective fear. Its high pitch abruptly interrupts the routine course of daily life. Provoking instant and total mental absorption, the scream paradoxically brings us back to reality, to the current time of now, as if a needle stung the collective body, exposing the limits of personal space and the shared sense of togetherness. What happens when the chroma key green­screen meets the psychotherapy session?”

Still from Scream Test, 2015.
Experimental Short Film, HD 1920x1080, 16:9, color, BE, 18:45 min.
Courtesy the artist

Virgile Fraisse

Born in 1990 in Paris (France)
Lives and works in Paris (France)

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Virgile Fraisse

Born in 1990 in Paris (France)
Lives and works in Paris (France)

Virgile Fraisse studied at Otis College (Los Angeles, MFA) and graduated from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris with jury honors (FR, MFA, 2014). 
He has taken part in many exhibitions including Hors Pistes Traversées, Centre Pompidou (FR); SEA-ME-WE, Clark House Initiative (IN); Hotel Europa, Art Vilnius (LT); Tarmac, Palais de Tokyo (FR); Instatata, Kunsthal Aarhus (DK); Clips Claps, Caro Sposo, Cinematheque Robert-Lynen (FR); LABOR ZERO LABOR, Triangle France (FR); 61e Salon de Montrouge (FR); Mad#2/#3, Maison Rouge (FR) ; Wicked Problem, Triangle France (FR); LOOP Festival Discovery Award (SP); Les Voyageurs, Palais des Beaux-arts (FR). He is the recipient of the Video Prize from Beaux-arts Foundation, Mécènes du Sud, ADAGP and CNC DICRéAM grants. Virgile Fraisse has also authored numerous performances, including A Cables Dialectic performed at the Palais des Beaux-arts (FR); Occupancy Scenarios (I, II, III) at Arnaud Deschin Gallery (FR), at Triangle France, Friche Belle de Mai and Beffroi of Montrouge; SEA-ME-WE, Chapter Two at Centre Pompidou - Hors Pistes Festival. Virgile Fraisse is resident at Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris (FR) and will be part of KHOJ-Coriolis Effect program (IN) in September 2017.

Virgile Fraisse has an installation on view at KB17 that explores geopolitical questions surrounding the Internet. He writes of his process: “In response to an anthropologist method, Virgile Fraisse’s work invests communication’s protocols by film and installation. By criticising neoliberal strategies, his films investigate cultural influences of transcontinental relationships, for example through the image of a submarine fibre optic cable’s deployment (SEA-ME-WE, 2015-2018), or through absorption mechanisms and extension of occidental patterns (as in Prédiction/Production, 2016, or in Situations Suivantes, 2014, with the South African community’s Americanisation process). Therefore, how to measure possibilities to counter the colonisation of image circulation? With a pastiche tone, parodying the film format becoming then playgrounds, characters embody contradictory positions one after the other. Pursuing this dialectical logic with an in situ dimension, the installations convoking architectural gestures shape our physical access to information; the installations require the audience to take a stand.”

SEA-ME-WE, Chapter Two: Of All Wired Blocks Holding a City, 2017.
Filmic installation, 2 screens.
Courtesy the artist
Photo of artist by Linda Yablonsky
The presence of this artwork was made possible by French liaison Abi Tariq, with support from Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris

Waheeda Baloch

Born in 1977 in Mirpurkhas( Pakistan)
Lives and works between Jamshoro (Pakistan) and Karachi (Pakistan)

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Waheeda Baloch

Born in 1977 in Mirpurkhas( Pakistan)
Lives and works between Jamshoro (Pakistan) and Karachi (Pakistan)

Waheeda Baloch is an artist, educator and curator, she holds an MA degree in Fine Art, as well as a Master’s degree in Curating from Stockholm University, Sweden. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the Department of Islamic and Asian Art History, University of Bonn, Germany.  She has been engaged in research and writing along with working as an artist. Her artistic practice is heavily influenced by her practice of writing. Nowadays, she is based in Jamshoro, where she is working as Assistant Professor at the University of Sindh, she teaches contemporary Art History courses. Baloch works as performance artist and her performance work, The Left to Choose, is remembered as an iconic solo performance piece, which took place at the Art Chowk Gallery Karachi in 2014. She has brought art and music together in an emotionally charged laborious and performance. She is keenly interested in art practice that involves history and historical research. She extracts and develops her work from the history, rewriting of the existing narratives which influence an individual as well as the whole society.

Waheeda Baloch describes her performative work for the Karachi Biennale 2017, Repertoire, which will take place at the Theosophical Society: “It intends to represent and witness the erasure in context with the individual and collective histories. Libraries are the spaces of knowledge, in fact, whoever wanted to destruct a nation, destroyed their libraries. The famous event of burning of the library of Alexandria, which resulted a huge loss of ancient knowledge which was recorded in those burnt books. However, it is also true that the existence of any book on a shelf in a library doesn’t ensure the transmission of the truth. Erasure takes place on all levels in society, the books are also a witness of such erasures, they are considered as treasure of knowledge but the knowledge may be fabricated and twisted. This is a point of departure for me to work with the idea of erasure, censor and rewriting in the context of libraries especially in the time when these spaces that are called libraries mostly remain empty.”

Repertoire, 2017.
Performance
30 min.

Wajid Ali

Born in 1981 in Daharki (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Gujrat (Pakistan)

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Wajid Ali

Born in 1981 in Daharki (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Gujrat (Pakistan)

Wajid Ali obtained his MA (Hons.) in Visual Art from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2010, after receiving his BFA (Hons.) from the University of Karachi in 2004. His work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. He has been a key member of important artistic projects, including: the ‘W11 – Karachi to Melbourne Project’ for the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne; and ‘The Great Wall of Pakistani Truck Art Project at the new Islamabad Airport, in 2017. He has conducted several art workshops and seminars at various institutions, such as: University of Gujrat; Mirpur University, Azad Kashmir; Hazara University, Manshera, KPK, and has worked with the craftsmen of Hunza and Attabad in Gilgit-Baltistan. Ali’s artistic practice derives from his passion from land travel, roaming the diverse regions of Pakistan in buses, trains, trucks and automobiles, taking the viewer on a virtual voyage through his experiences. These experiences have led the artist to discover and immerse himself in new cultures and their modes of expression, establishing a novel, tripartite dialogue between the audience, Ali’s personal journeys and the places to which he has travelled.

Ali’s work for the Karachi Biennale 2017 is a series of lightboxes; artistic travelogues depicting his wanderings from January 2014 to December 2016. The concept of an artistic travelogue has been a long-term project for Ali, having developed it in 2009, with the artist marking his journeys in a diary on a daily basis ever since. The grand scale of the 36 lightboxes appropriately highlights the abstract complexity of the intersecting web of the 1095 drawings, with each of the three rows of twelve drawings representing a calendar year. Ali describes his project: “Through lines and mark-making I have recreated journeys that have been taken by me over several years, on paths trodden a hundred times or sometimes only once. The continuity of the lines reflects time and space, taking the viewer on a trip through my personal experiences.”

Journeys Taken 2014-2016 (Installation of 1095 Drawings), 2017.
Valchromat, transparency films, pen, acrylic sheet, SMD backlit
23 x 1097 x 9 cm.
Courtesy the artist

Wardah Bukhari

Born in 1988 in Multan (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

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Wardah Bukhari

Born in 1988 in Multan (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Wardah Naeem Bukhari earned her Bachelor’s of Graphic Design from the Multan College of Arts, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan (2010) and completed her Master’s in Visuals Arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore (2012). She continues her studio practice while teaching as visiting lecturer at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan. Bukhari was Guest Curator of the first studio BQ Artist-in-Residence program (2015) in Murree. She was selected to participate in the International-Artist-In-Residence program at Arthub, Arizona, United States (2016). She was also invited for an artist talk at South Asian Women Collective, New York (2016). Bukhari works in various mediums, including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, digital art and performance art. Her works concentrate on the boundaries between inside and outside, content and form, feeling and shape, impression and expression. She has participated in several group exhibitions in Multan, Lahore, Islamabad, Karachi, as well as in the UK, Turkey, the UAE and the US. 

In her video on view at KB17, Bukhari captures a simple domestic act: A woman’s hands kneading bread. By focusing on the movement of a woman’s hands working dough, Bukhari seeks to explore the idea of suppression. On the surface, this video is about an everyday chore. But there are also undercurrents of a woman’s search for pleasure, providing a link between what she calls “female task and female fantasy.” As the artist states, “It is a celebration of a woman’s freedom of body and her freedom from male dominance.”

Still from Suppression, 2017.
Video, 12 min.
Courtesy the artist

Wolfgang Spahn

Born in 1970 in Ingolstadt (Germany)
Lives and works in Berlin (Germany)

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Wolfgang Spahn

Born in 1970 in Ingolstadt (Germany)
Lives and works in Berlin (Germany)

Wolfgang Spahn is an Austrian-German visual artist based in Berlin. He teaches at the Professional Association of Visual Artists in Berlin (BBK-Berlin) and is Associated Lecturer at the University of Paderborn, Department of Media Studies as well as at the University of Oldenburg, Department of Art and Visual Culture. Spahn has presented his work at numerous exhibitions, biennials and festivals of media art throughout the world.

Of his work for KB17, Spahn writes: “The media installation Noctilucent aims at re-mediating Pakistani truck art. A burnt out mini-bus located on the premises of the biennale in Karachi serves as both an artefact and a canvas. By using mulitcoloured LED's to up-cycle the bus, Noctilucent creates patterns that are luminous only at night or at twilight. In the same way as noctilucent clouds are visible only when the sun is already below the horizon and is illuminating them from below, Noctilucent is representing mediatized patterns at night while the actual paintings are hardly visible. During the day Noctilucent showcases black and white patterns of frost flowers to match the ice-crystals noctilucent clouds are made of. From dust to dawn, multicoloured LED's move to-and-fro the spectrum of colours, motioned by the algorithm the installation is based on. The surface of the bus functions as a palimpsest – a valuable 'parchment' that had been written upon twice, with the first writing washed away to make space for new writing, in this case for the re-use of media. Yet the LED‘s changes are influenced by cosmic rays: Whenever a cosmic trigger hits the installation, the contemplative movement gets disrupted, the LED‘s flare and flicker before it finally tranquilizes. Thus Noctilucent uses re-mediation as a translucent process that does not want to efface the old medium nor does it want to efface itself entirely. By using strong contrasts for day-or-night- display, Noctilucent emphasizes the difference between the old medium and the new one rather than erases it.” Spahn’s performative piece, Entropie, is also part of the Karachi Biennale 2017.

Noctilucent, 2017.
Media installation: van, RGB-LEDs, controller, paint.
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist