Venues

Claremont House

Claremont House was constructed on the 1st of August 1863. This 154-year-old building is listed as a heritage site, under the Sindh Cultural Heritage Preservation Act 1994. Once a privately-owned colonial bungalow, it was subsequently bought by National Foods and used as their corporate office. The architecture of this building recalls Karachi's colonial era under the British Raj, with its masonry in Ghizri limestone, a gabled roof with terracotta tiles, wooden staircase and floors covered with its original floral-geometric tiles.

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Participating Artists:

Omer Wasim /
1 / 20

Omer Wasim

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

Omer Wasim earned his BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture and an MA in Critical Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, USA. Wasim is a Lecturer in the Liberal Arts Programme at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi where he teaches art history, theory and criticism. He has been practicing in Karachi since 2014, and his recent collaborative works with Saira Sheikh have been shown in Pakistan, Egypt and South Korea.

Omer Wasim writes of his installation for KB17: “My works have called upon the act of witnessing and of bearing witness to an ‘unprecedented historical occurrence of […] an event eliminating its own witness.’ These works were made to attest the presence of an absent, albeit recurring, lover, and to trace the genealogies and histories of lands lost and found. For the inaugural Karachi Biennale, the work that I am proposing will bear witness to two lovers who fall in and out of love by the Indian Ocean—with broader implications on my relationship with Karachi, family histories, and our collective relationship with the ocean and its ever shifting boundaries. The work will be made using relics of companionship, and what happens when these come in contact with the ocean. The onlooker, for example, will witness how the ocean changes the hue of fabrics, and how metal reacts when it comes in contact with saline water. I am interested in exploring the material possibilities that come with living and making work in Karachi. Karachi has been a recurring geographical point of arrival and departure in my life, both conceptually and historically—it is a place that I am bound to in perpetuity. However, my relationship with Karachi is contentious at best. Are there ways to address, disrupt, revisit, and perhaps rewrite these relationships?”

Props from an Unrealised Play, 2015-17.
Metal, shirts, concrete planter, soil, Cestrum Nocturnumm, water, pencil on paper, wood, glass, concrete, 175 pounds of nails, sea water, archival prints, fabric, glass bottles, sea salt, sand, and rust
Dimensions: variable

Abdul Jabbar Gul /
2 / 20

Abdul Jabbar Gul

Born in 1969 in Mirpurkhas (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Abdul Jabbar Gull completed his BFA in Sculpture from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 1996. He has several solo and group shows to his credit. From 1998 to 2008 he taught sculpture at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi and is still engaged with various institutes as visiting faculty. Gull attended the Fordsburg Residency Program, Johannesburg (2002); VASL International Artists’ Residency, Karachi (2005); 8th International Stone Sculpture Symposium, Seoul; Sculpture Symposium, Spain (2013) (2014) and (2015); and Arrecido Wood Symposium, Spain (2014). His work is part of collections nationally and internationally. He has completed several major commissions, including a mural for The State Bank of Pakistan, a metal sculpture for the Head office Faysal Bank in Karachi and a metal Installation for Glaxosmitithkline head office in Karachi. He is the recipient of the National Excellence Award for Sculpture by the Pakistan National Council of Arts and the Punjab Artist Association Award for Sculpture.

Abdul Jabbar Gull writes: “Growing up in Mirpurkhas, a remote area in Pakistan that does not have any conventional art activities associated with larger towns, I remember on my way to school seeing a sign painter that used to work in calligraphy and make portraits. Watching him at work motivated me to attempt calligraphy and make sketches on my schoolbooks. Later, as an art student at the National College of Arts, Lahore, I explored various disciplines. In sculpture I found what I had been searching for all along. It helped me develop my senses and increased my awareness towards the world around me. I learnt to see and feel my surroundings in an entirely new way. I found my passion…I find wood and metal to be sympathetic mediums; they help me to enhance my quest and continue it. My carvings in wood set out to explore numerous questions arising from the changing circumstances of my life. I have no conclusions, so my work speaks of the mysteries and ambiguities faced in this process.”

 

 

 

 

 

Ordinary Souls, 2017.
Wood, brass and aluminum
167 cm high
Courtesy the artist

Jamil Dehlavi /
3 / 20

Jamil Dehlavi

Born in Calcutta (India)
Lives and works between Karachi (Pakistan) and London (UK)

Jamil Dehlavi is an independent filmmaker who read law at Oxford University and was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in London. He then studied film directing at Columbia University in New York where he received a Master of Fine Arts. He has written, produced and directed many international award-winning feature films and documentaries including TOWERS OF SILENCE, THE BLOOD OF HUSSAIN, BORN OF FIRE, IMMACULATE CONCEPTION, PASSOVER, PASSION IN THE DESERT, JINNAH, INFINITE JUSTICE, GODFORSAKEN, SEVEN LUCKY GODS and BLOOD MONEY. His practise as a visual artist examines the relationship between the static and moving image while also investigating the intersection of sculpture and digital art.He has exhibited his work at UNESCO in Paris and at Amin Gulgee Gallery and KOEL Gallery, both in Karachi.For the last four years he also worked as an Associate Professor at the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Habib University, Karachi where he taught film production.

Jamil Dehlavi writes of Ghosts, which he made for KB17: “My work for the Biennale is a series of images extracted from 8mm film which my father shot in the 50s. The footage deteriorated over the years and I managed to salvage some frames which capture a sense of memory through fading and disintegrating images. These works are suggestive of the presence of absence and the fragility of life, evoking memories which are both personal and collective.”

 

Ghosts, 2017.
Archival prints on metal
244 x 30 cm.
Courtesy the artist

Muhammad Arslan Farooqi /
4 / 20

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.

Still from Dying Inayat, 2016.
Video animation
Courtesy the artist

Heba Y. Amin /
5 / 20

Heba Y. Amin

Born in 1980 in Cairo (Egypt)
Lives and works in Berlin (Germany)

Heba Y. Amin is an Egyptian visual artist, researcher and lecturer. She is currently teaching at Bard College Berlin, is a BGSMSC doctorate fellow at Freie Universität, and a recent resident artist at the Bethanien artist residency program in Berlin. Amin has received many grants, including the Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant, the DAAD grant and the Rhizome Commissions grant. She is the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, the curator of visual art for the MIZNA journal (US), and curator for the biennial residency program DEFAULT with Ramdom Association (IT). Furthermore, Amin is also one of the artists behind the subversive graffiti action on the set of the television series “Homeland” which received worldwide media attention. Amin has had recent exhibitions at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin, Kalmar Art Museum Sweden, La Villette Paris, FACT Liverpool, Kunsthalle Wien, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Camera Austria, Berlin Berlinale 9th Forum Expanded Exhibition, the IV Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, and the WRO 15th Media Art Biennale Poland.

Heba Y. Amin writes of her video on view at KB17: “On January 27th, 2011 Egyptian authorities succeeded in shutting down the country’s international Internet access points in response to growing protests. Over one weekend, a group of programmers developed a platform called Speak2Tweet that would allow Egyptians to post their breaking news on Twitter via voicemail despite Internet cuts. The result was thousands of heartfelt messages from Egyptians recording their emotions by phone. A few years later the messages are no longer accessible to the public. Speak2Tweet composed a unique archive of the collective psyche; as the voices disappeared in the depths of cyberspace, this project brings forth the unique narratives and, in turn, connects them once again to the physical realm. Project Speak2Tweet is both a research project and a growing archive of experimental films that utilizes Speak2Tweet messages prior to the fall of the Mubarak regime on February 11, 2011 and juxtaposes them with the abandoned structures that represent the long-lasting effects of a corrupt dictatorship. The project interrogates the re-imagining of the urban myth, of visualizing the city from the ‘personal’ perspective through the highly problematic constructs of (un)democratic tools. It explores the emergence of the imagined city from internal monologues and investigates historical narratives via glitches in digital memory. Through the multi-layered spatial relationships, the project attempts to portray the psychology of the urban realm. As the visual archive grows, Project Speak2Tweet changes and transforms into an altered space that mimics the hallucination of the inner voice.”

 

Still from My Love for You, Egypt, Increases by the Day from Project Speak2Tweet, 2011.
Video, 6:18 min.
Courtesy the artist

Ehsan Memon /
6 / 20

Ehsan Memon

Born in 1989 in (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Ehsan Memon received a BFA (with Distinction) from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2016. His work has been shown at group exhibitions around Pakistan at a variety of galleries, including: Canvas Gallery, Karachi; Gallery 6, Islamabad; O Art Space, Lahore; Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery, National College of Arts, Lahore; and Alhamra Art Gallery, Lahore. He has participated in multiple art residencies, such as: Artist in Residency at International Steel Limited, Karachi; Pioneer Art Residency, Lahore; and Vasl Artists’ Collective’s Taza Tareen Residency, Karachi, as well as winning the Young Artist Award in Alhamra Art Gallery’s annual exhibition, ‘About Time’ in 2015. His sculpturally-based art practice toys with perception and notions of reality, manifesting itself in his work with the hyper-realistic re-creation of objects as souvenirs from personal narratives. An integral component of Memon’s work is its interaction with the viewer; its aesthetic verisimilitude deceives the viewer, subverting perceptions of reality, and in doing so, visually mimics the duplicitous facets of human behaviour.

In Memon’s untitled sculptural installation for the Karachi Biennale 2017, the artist applies his practice of veristically replicating the form of objects to types of local flatbreads, creating a multitude of these convincing panary imitations with painted fiberglass. The realisation of the artist’s work brings to mind the reputed verisimilitude of Myron’s bronze Heifer, memorialised by dozens of epigrams in The Greek Anthology, one of which, written by Dioskorides, proclaims: “O, bull, in vain you mount this heifer, for it is lifeless. The sculptor of cows, Myron, has deceived you.” The illusion of veracity imbued within Memon’s sculptures provides a commentary on superficiality and deception in our society; simultaneously a representation of the ability of the human eye to be deceived by appearance, and the reality of deceit as an aspect of human behaviour.

Untitled, 2017.
Oil on fiberglass
Dimensions variable

Irfan Hasan /
7 / 20

Irfan Hasan

Born in 1982 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Irfan Hasan obtained his BFA (with Distinction) from the National College of Arts, Lahore majoring in Indo-Persian miniature painting in 2006, winning the award for ‘Best Young Painter’ from the Punjab Arts Council the next two successive years. He has also attended a variety of residencies, such as: Art OMI, New York; Storefront Artist Project, Massachusetts; Vasl Artist’s Collective, Karachi; and the Commonwealth Connection International Fellowship at GCAC, Kolkata. Hasan has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. He is currently teaching at the National College of Arts, Lahore. His art practice absorbs both eastern and western influences; his training as a miniaturist has shaped his technical practice, yet the canonical European portraiture has been his point of reference. In the artist’s words, “My works are an homage to the portraiture of the European masters and the practice of stylization within Indo­Persian miniature painting; a personal synthesis of aspects of classical portraiture and miniature painting.”

Hasan’s painting for the Karachi Biennale 2017, Holy Man, epitomises his artistic practice. His work is a tribute to Abu’l Hasan Khan Ghaffari Kashani, commonly known as Sani ol molk, one of the master watercolourists in the Qajar court in Iran. In his emulation of Sani ol molk’s works, Hasan has utilised a traditional technique of Mughal and Persian miniature painting – hand-ground opaque watercolour and gouache on paper. However, the subject of Hasan’s portrait is represented in profile and naturalistically, forcibly recalling the portraiture of Piero della Francesca. This reveals Holy Man as an intersection of art historical influences, synthesised by Hasan as the contemporary mediator. Indeed, it is a fitting homage to Sani ol molk, who himself spent four years in Italy, studying the works of Italian masters, before returning to the Shah’s court. Hasan’s performative painting, Self-portrait, is also part of the Karachi Biennale 2017.

Holy Man, 2017.
Opaque watercolour on paper
102 x 152 cm.
Courtesy the artist

Goddy Leye /
8 / 20

Goddy Leye

1965 (Mbouda, Cameroun) - 2011 (Bonendale, Cameroun)
Lived and worked in Bonendale (Cameroun)

Goddy Leye (AKA Godfried Kadjo) was, and very much remains, a central figure on the Cameroonian contemporary art scene. His practice as a multi-media creator and, in particular, his pioneering video work introduced the latter genre to Central Africa in the 1990s. As a teacher and a mentor, he played a key role in the emergence of an entire generation of Cameroonian artists, several of whom have gone on to successful international careers. From 1986 to 1989, Leye attended the University of Yaoundé. While working on a Master’s degree in African literature (which he received in 1990), he simultaneously studied with art historian and artist Pascal Kenfack (1987-1992). From, there, he moved on to the National Institute in Bamako (Mali), where he studied in 1994, the ZKM Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media (Germany, 1997), the 18th Street Arts Complex (Santa Monica, California, 1997), and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam, 2002). Determined to help develop the art scene in his native Cameroon, in 2002 Leye settled in the village of Bonendale, on the outskirts of Douala, the country’s economic capital. There, he founded the Art Bakery, a research and residency space where he welcomed young artists in quest of training in multimedia, installation, video and digital practices. While numerous projects and residencies took him abroad on a regular basis (to London, Cairo, Guangzhou and multiple cities in between), he always returned to the Art Bakery, his primary focus from 2002 until his untimely passing in 2011. Leye received key prizes for his work as an artist and an educator from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Rockefeller Foundation and UNESCO. An ambassador for the Creative Africa Network (CAN), he sat on expert committees the world over.

Goddy Leye’s iconic video The Beautiful Beast is on view at KB17. In it, a man writhes on the ground against a pixelated field. We know nothing of him, save that he seems in pain. Or might he be grinning? The image is violently disturbing. Overhead, coming in waves, is a soundscape: Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece, “M”.  A Hitlerian voice battles with another, a voice of reason and demand: demand that the man on the ground be treated with care or perhaps, simply, with basic human sympathy. We will never know which voice wins out.

The Beautiful Beast, 2009.
Video and sound installation projected on a bed of sesame seeds, 4:38 (looped)
© Goddy Leye
Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Galerie Peter Hermann, Lomé, Togo
Curated by SPARCK.

Pala Pothupitiye /
9 / 20

Pala Pothupitiye

Born in 1972 in Deniyaya (Sri Lanka)
Lives and works in Mullegama (Sri Lanka)

Pala Pothupitiye obtained his degree in Fine Arts from the Visual and Performance Art University in Colombo. Raised in a village of traditional southern Sri Lankan craft-artists and ritualists, his work incorporates and reinterprets the material and philosophical content of traditional art. Pothupitiye confronts issues such as colonialism, nationalism, religious extremism and militarism, and extends his inquiry to questions of caste, the distinction between art and craft, tradition and modernity, as well as generating a critique of Euro-centrism. In 2005, he was selected to participate in the third Fukuoka Triennial at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, and in 2010 he won the jury award of the Sovereign Art Asian Prize, Hong Kong. At present, Pothupitiye is living and working at the Mullegama Art Center near Colombo where he runs his workshop and an art school, supporting younger artists and schoolchildren.

In his installation for the 2017 Karachi Biennale, Pothupitiye addresses the lingering detrimental effects of British colonialism on South Asia. In this work, he narrows in on two colonial legacies: tea and education. The British colonizers popularized tea both in Sri Lanka and Pakistan. The artist states, “Today tea is considered to be something soothing, refreshing. Locals and tourists alike perceive the plantations to be idyllic places. Few give much thought to the massive environmental destruction they have slowly caused over the centuries. Nor do they consider that the workers on these plantations do not benefit equally from the industry.” Similarly, the artist sees the Sri Lankan educational system as still beholden to a colonial mindset. He believes Western colonial rule institutionalized its oppressive power through its schools. In his work, contemporary tea bags are used to decorate a degree cloak with the intention of generating a focus and discussion on the negative colonial influences that still prevail in South Asia. 

Colonial Dress, 2017.
Metal, clothes, threads and ropes, fiber resin, used tea bags from Pakistan and Sri Lanka, acrylic
Dimensions variable

Aisha Abid Hussain /
10 / 20

Aisha Abid Hussain

Born in 1980 in Peshawar (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Aisha Abid Hussain is a multi-disciplinary artist who works in a variety of mediums, from Miniature Painting to Photography and Film. She obtained her MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2012, and her BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2008. She is a recipient of various scholarships and awards including Hajji Sharif Award in Miniature Painting from the National College of Arts, and New Contemporaries from ICA, London. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the world and in Pakistan, and she has held numerous solo shows, at venues including: Rohtas 2, Lahore; The Loft at the Lower Parel, Mumbai; Koel Gallery, Karachi; Hanmi Gallery, London; Gandhara Art Space, Karachi; and Alexis Renard Gallery, Paris. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the National College of Arts and Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. Hussain’s art practice is very much research-based, derivative of her fascination with personal and worldly history. Thus, a crucial aspect of her creative process comprises of excavating through archival documents, scripts, photographs and text. A constant point of reference in her technical practice is her training as a miniaturist, and by using this engrained sensibility, she oscillates between traditional and contemporary media in order to visually explore forgotten narratives she has discovered through archival research in her work.

Aisha Abid Hussain’s series of digital photographs, Two Not Together, expands on her artistic interest in the socio-cultural context of gender discourse, gently mocking societal fixation with wedding celebrations. Her works have been inspired by photographs found in a familial archive, and are consequently imbued with a pseudo-nostalgia that furthers the satire in her re-staging of the original ceremony. The composition of the photographs is carefully arranged, not only referring back to Hussain’s archival source, but capturing the gender politics and power dynamic between the betrothed in their roles of ‘bride’ and ‘groom’. This is ultimately subverted by the fact that both parties in the photographs are female, but with costume, gesture and stance as gender signifiers, subtly critiquing the contextual rigidity of the institution of marriage.

Two Not Together, 2014.
Archival print on Hahnemuhle photo rag
83.82 x 59.69 cm.
Collection of the artist

Hamida Khatri /
11 / 20

Hamida Khatri

Born in 1985 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Baltimore (USA)

Hamida Khatri works in a variety of mediums — from figurative drawings, to photography, to sculptural puppets, to animation. As well as an artist, she is also a writer, curator, arts educator, community activist, and a creative arts therapist. She holds an MFA in Community Arts and a Certificate in Teaching from the Maryland Institute College of Art (U.S.), Certificate in Humanistic Counseling (U.K.), MBA in marketing (Pakistan), and a BFA in sculpture and photography (Pakistan). She is the Founder and Director of Creative Therapy Platform — A Voluntary Travel-Community Project focused on crafting healing spaces in underrepresented areas. Her recent success lies in the initiation of a social justice community-based venture, [i am] Project KALI – Celebration of Womanhood, in Baltimore, where she has created a safe space for women with a history of trauma and abuse via artistic collaborations and interventions. The project secured grants by The Pollination Project, France-Merrick Opportunity Fund, and Launch Artists in Baltimore Award. By establishing linking platforms, she has been able to curate numerous shows where community participants’ artworks have been displayed, including: Gallery Four, Motor House, Rousse Gallery, Meyerhoff Gallery, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Khatri has been an artist-in-residence for Elsewhere (Greensboro, U.S.), Khoj International Artists’ Association (India), Uronto Residential Artist Exchange Program (Bangladesh), and Soch Studio (India). She has been widely exhibited in Pakistan, U.S., and Bangladesh, including the Florence Biennale – X Edition in Italy.

Hamida Khatri writes of her submission for KB17: “Hamida Khatri’s current body of work pays homage to her mother who has always supported her dream of having an independent life. The Screenshot Montage is a documentation of her conversations with her mother — living in Karachi, Pakistan — over the phone while being in the U.S. Whereas Mom & Me, a ‘witnessing’ stop-motion animation, portrays the familiarization of the routine tasks she executes every day being in a foreign land away from her mother.”

Still from Mom & Me, 2017.
Stop-motion animation, 4:10 min.
Courtesy the artist

Afshar Malik /
12 / 20

Afshar Malik

Born in 1955 in Bahawalpur (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Afshar Malik received a BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 1978 and a Higher Diploma in Fine Arts from the Slade School of Fine Arts, London in 1988. He taught at the National College of Arts, Lahore from 1983 until his retirement in 2015. Malik has had solo shows in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Pakistan, the UK, the US, Iran and Sri Lanka. He has participated in workshops in Karachi and Mumbai and conducted several workshops in Lahore.

Afshar Malik writes of his painting Far Away Now for KB17: “Once, we began to say what we knew and write our own histories of the lives we were living. Coming of age, as it were, at forty, we walked up and down, negotiated and redefined our preferred ascents and descents of life. History was written right there and then, on the same page, with invisible inks of memory and anticipation—everything, like scales, numbers, erased or unscratched stories from the past and future, road maps, mediums and their methods to practice. History appeared like a photograph, a mirror, or a flower in our hands, telling one’s own self a story and writing the sounds from the past. Life is always on the move to varied ascents—or descents—every second, every moment. One ‘falls’ down and follows one’s own descent. The age of realization is marked—one has to choose, walk down the hill to where one started, back to the waters and be a fire to warm it. ‘I’m the eyes’, she said once.…and said, ‘we live, we fight to survive and keep the very true instinct in us alive so as to keep the blood warm in our veins’. This is about those people who dared to think and took pride in becoming and being—lone fighters, combating in the battlefield of life or fighting the war against dying. They also believed in their core that the war was not meant to be won or lost—it was the struggle which made them go on and gave them strength. To live and breathe, to sing a song while making a mark with a stitch, a non-ending thread twisting and turning to form a living pattern. A thread holds a needle, weaves their tears and gives moisture to a dry cloth.”

Far Away Now, 2017.
Oil and acrylic on canvas
168 x 137 cm.
Courtesy the artist

Li Wei /
13 / 20

Li Wei

Born in 1970 in Hubei (China)
Lives and works in Beijing (China)

Li Wei’s artistic practice is a dynamic amalgamation of performance art and photography. Using acrobatics, props, cranes and wires, the artist surprises the viewer with dramatic, often amusing performance installations that depict him in photographs in gravity-defying situations, giving the impression of flight. Li Wei’s work has been widely shown across the globe, including: the 55th Venice Biennale; the Katonah Museum of Art, United States; the Beijing Times Art Museum, China; the Daegu Photo Biennale 2010 in South Korea; the Palazzo Reale Museum, Milan; the Olympic Museum, Switzerland; the Criterion Gallery, Australia; the Toulouse Art Museum, France; the Ox Warehouse, Macau; the Prague Biennial 2003; the Beijing Red Square; the Hong Kong Arts Center; and the Performance Art Festival, Beijing. His impressive résumé also includes many solo exhibitions, including: Parc de la Villette, Paris; 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong; Shanghai Tang, Hong Kong; Tribeca, Madrid; Michael Schultz Gallery, Beijing; Mogadishni CPH Gallery, Denmark; Yeh Rong Jia Culture & Art Foundation, Taiwan; EScape Cultural Ample Gallery; PYO Gallery, Seoul; Galeria Espacio Minimo, Madrid; and Marella Gallery, Italy.

One of the photographs selected for the Karachi Biennale 2017, Boxing, embodies Li Wei’s artistic practice, depicting the artist himself falling from a skyscraper in Beijing during an apparent bout with another figure. The timing of the photograph, along with its composition, are immaculate; the artist is seen at the point of the punch’s impact, an act of violence, falling backwards off an edificial precipice, the bottom of which neither the artist nor the audience can see, imbuing the photograph with a sense of fear and danger. Li Wei’s matching chequered costume blends in with the surrounding buildings, confirming the reality of this danger by implying that he is soon to become a part of the architecture. The fact that the artist’s work is not an illusion created by careful editing on a computer, but partially a performative piece, forcibly provoking the viewer’s instinctive reactions to such visceral visual stimulus, subverts the justified cynicism that pervades our perception of photographic media in contemporary society.

 

Boxing, 2009.
Photographic print, performance
176 x 366 cm.
Courtesy the artist

Heide Hatry /
14 / 20

Heide Hatry

Born in 1965 in Sindelfingen (Germany)
Lives and works in New York (USA)

Heide Hatry grew up on a farm in the south of Germany. She left home at the age of 15 to enroll in a sports school, studied art at various German art schools and art history at the University of Heidelberg and taught at a private art school for 15 years while simultaneously conducting an international business as an antiquarian bookseller. Since moving to New York in 2003 she has curated numerous exhibitions in the United States, Canada, Germany and Spain and has shown her own work at museums and galleries around the world, including Mona (Museum for New and Old Art), Tasmania. Australia; Reina Sophia and Fundación Alianza Hispanica, Madrid, Spain; Museum Moyland, Bedburg Hau, and Klingspor Museum, Frankfurt, Germany; Under Heaven Contemporary Art Museum, Beijing, China; and Cultural Institute, Santiago, Chile. Events in conjunction with her exhibitions took place at the New Museum, MOMA PS1, CAA Conference, Deutsches Haus/New York University, Drawing Center, in NYC; and many others. She is represented by Ubu Gallery in New Yorl.

The portraits from Heide Hatry’s series Heads and Tales on view at KB17 are photographic documentations of sculptures addressing issues of violence, death and gender identity. The artist is best known for her body-related performances and her work employing animal flesh and organs. She is often described as a neo-conceptualist and, to the extent that the "space" in which her work operates transcends, transgresses, or transforms the normal relationship of artist to both audience and work, this is accurate – her work does not reside in the pictorial plane, the sculptural space, or filmic time. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, gender roles (and specifically what it means to be a woman), the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, the human exploitation of the natural world, and the social oblivion that permits atrocity to persist in our midst. She refers to her large-scale, usually broadly collaborative, projects, which always involve multiple layers of perception, as Gesamtkunstwerke: she creates the art work, displays it, often in unorthodox ways, composes books and organizes events in which different aspects of performances or texts bring new perspectives to the work.

Jennifer, 2008.
Silver Halide C-Print
50 x 70 cm.
Courtesy the artist

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto /
15 / 20

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Born in 1990 in Damascus (Syria)
Lives and works in San Francisco (USA)

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is an artist, curator and performer of mixed Pakistani and Lebanese descent and spent most of his life in Karachi, Pakistan but is now based in the U.S. Bhutto has exhibited his work extensively in the United States, as well as in Colombia, Pakistan and the U.A.E. He has a degree in Art History from the University of Edinburgh and an MFA in Studio Art from the San Francisco Art Institute from where he graduated in 2016. He continues to work with galleries and institutions in San Francisco, such as Southern Exposure, SAFEHouse Arts and SOMArts.

In the works from the series Mussalmaan Musclemen on view at KB17, all images have been taken from a translation of a book supposedly originally written by Arnold Schwarzenegger, muscleman icon, actor and former governor of California. There is no true original English version as the book is a pirated mishmash of various books. This kaleidoscope of exercise manuals, alongside the Urdu translation and accompanying images of what appear to be white or white-passing men projects this book into a world of its own creation, existing neither completely in the East nor in the West. Rather, it occupies a liminal space. Bhutto explored this liminality by feminizing an otherwise ultra-masculine conversation. The artist scanned and printed these pages onto cotton fabric, blown up several times the size of the original; he then intervened by replacing hard muscle with soft flowery fabric and brightly colored embroidery thread, utilizing feminine practice to reveal the softness behind the muscle. The artist sought to create his own version of masculinity, making new men out of old ones and satirising the very serious and robust pride behind bodybuilding by inserting elements of humor and playfulness into it.

Pao, 2016.
Archival inkjet print on cotton fabric, embroidery thread, polyester fabric, satin backing
Courtesy the artist

Fazal Rizvi /
16 / 20

Fazal Rizvi

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

Fazal Rizvi graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2010 and is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, photography, installation, video and text. His work has been exhibited locally and internationally, at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. He has taken part in a variety of residencies, including: the Arcus Project Residency, Japan; the British Council Residency at Gasworks, London; and the Murree Museum Artist Residency, Pakistan, as well as being the Art Writer in residence for VASL Residency in 2015. Rizvi has also been a core member of the Tentative Collective since 2014, and currently teaches at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi. Rizvi’s practice began as an intensely personal investigation of changing familial relationships within the framework of the discovery and articulation of sexuality, but later expanded to incorporate the use of outwardly disparate socio-political, cultural and historical events in order to draw parallels and highlight disjuncture. Rizvi is engaged with the vocabulary of loss and absence, difference and dislocation, within the sphere of an increasingly open-ended approach spanning a variety of technical methodologies. His work initiates a dialogue that is intensely personal, yet also pluralistic, questioning notions of identity, memory and erasure.

The exegesis of Rizvi’s work for the Karachi Biennale 2017, Kedgeree, lies in the artist’s introspective investigation into his formative years, from a linguistic standpoint. Beginning as an exploration of language politics within his own trajectory, the basis of which being his predominately Urdu-speaking familial background, the work transcends Rizvi’s individual concern, becoming a collection of visual metaphors which delineate the role that language plays in establishing and preserving class-divides. Displaying his multi-disciplinary approach, Rizvi utilises a variety of media as component parts within a minimalist aesthetic framework to play with the notions of exclusion, division, accessibility and social mobility that are inherent within the landscape of a post-colonial society, through the scope of their linguistic manifestations.

Kedgeree, 2014.
Publication, found photographs of colonial tiger hunts, abused ceramics, paint/stains/pigments, wood, ink on paper.
Dimensions variable

Nadia Kaabi-Linke /
17 / 20

Nadia Kaabi-Linke

Born in 1978 in Tunis (Tunisia)
Lives and works in Berlin (Germany)

Nadia Kaabi-Linke was born Tunis, Tunisia and raised in Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. She graduated from the University of Fine Arts, Tunis, in 1999, and earned a Ph.D. at Université Paris-Sorbonne, in 2008. Growing up between Tunis, Kiev, and Dubai, and now residing in Berlin, Kaabi-Linke has a personal history of migration across cultures and borders that has greatly influenced her work. Her works give physical presence to that which tends to remain invisible, be it people, structures, or the geopolitical forces that shape them. Using a variety of materials and methods, Kaabi-Linke often works in-situ on projects that relate directly to their exhibition sites. Kaabi-Linke has had solo exhibitions at Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azevedo Perdigão, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2014); The Mosaic Rooms, London (2014); and Dallas Contemporary, Texas (2015). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2011); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (2012); Musée National de Carthage, Tunisia (2012); Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw (2013); Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2014), and Marta Herford, Museum für Kunst, Design und Architektur, Herford, Germany (2016); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016). She also participated in the Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2009); Alexandria Biennial for Mediterranean Countries (2009); Venice Biennale (2011); Liverpool Biennial (2012), and Kochi-Muziris Biennial, Kerala, India (2012).

Border crossings of many kinds—European and North African, Islamic and Christian, East and West Berlin—have often served as the impetus for Kaabi-Linke’s endeavors. In No (2012), on view at KB17, she reflects on the absurd difficulties of her own application as a Tunisian for entry into the United Kingdom in order to deliver a lecture, with a pair of disembodied lips reciting the accusatory questions found on British visa application forms as a crowd of churchgoers opposes the voice of authority in unison. Also on view at KB17 is a performance work entitled “Healing,” done in collaboration with Karachi-based artist Samina Islam. The work involves stitching, text, jasmine flowers, and their perpetual upkeep.

No, 2012
2 channel video installation, 4:19 min.
Commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial 2012
Co-produced by the Kamel Lazaar Fundation
Courtesy the artist and Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai

Han Seok Hyun /
18 / 20

Han Seok Hyun

Born in 1975 in Seoul (South Korea)
Lives and works between Seoul and Berlin (Germany)

Han Seok Hyun received his MFA from Korea National University of Arts. His work has been exhibited in museums around the world, including The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston); Buk Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul); Total Museum of Art (Seoul); Pohang Museum of Art (Pohang); The Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (Gyunggido); the Ilmin Museum of Art (Seoul) and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin).

In the installation Super-Natural, on view at KB17, Han creates an undulating landscape of mass-produced green products that he has sourced locally. He writes: “It is, of course, no coincidence that so many companies use the color green to package allegedly healthy goods; marketers associate it with harmony and peace, growth, luck, and energy. The title Super-Natural, a nod to the supermarkets in which these products are sold and to the elevated properties they are claimed to possess, reminds us that these products may be greener in color than in substance. Green hues are often used to make unhealthy products seem more acceptable to impressionable shoppers, and words like natural and healthy have little or no correlation to a product’s contents or to the practices used to produce them.”

 

 

 

 

Super-Natural: The Borrowed Landscape, 2016.
Installation with mass-produced green-colored products
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist

Malala Andrialavidrazana /
19 / 20

Malala Andrialavidrazana

Born in 1971 in (Madagascar)
Lives and practices in Paris (France)

By way of the photographic medium, Malala Andrialavidrazana’s practice interrogates barriers and interactions within cross-cultural contexts, thoughtfully shifting between private spaces and global considerations to explore social imaginaries. Based on extensive in situ as well as bibliographic and archival research, her visual compositions open up the possibility of alternative forms of storytelling and history-making. Andrialavidrazana graduated from La Villette School of Architecture (Paris) in 1996. Her d’Outre-Monde series was awarded the prestigious HSBC Prize for Photography, and released in print by the renowned Actes Sud publishing house in 2004. She received the joint support of the Institut Français and the National Arts Council of South Africa for her series Echoes (from Indian Ocean), published in 2013 by Kehrer Verlag. At the moment, Andrialavidrazana is at work on an ongoing series titled Figures, highlighted in the present installation. Over the past years, Andrialavidrazana’s work has been exhibited in numerous international venues. Recently, these have included: Bamako Encounters (Mali 2015); Museum of Natural History (Le Havre, France 2016); Kehrer Galerie (Berlin 2016); Changjiang International Photography & Video Biennial (Chonqing, China 2017); Kalmar Konstmuseum (Kalmar, Sweden 2017); PAC Milano (Milan 2017); Lyon Biennial (Lyon 2017); C-Gallery (Milan 2017); 50 Golborne (London 2017).

Figures is the title of Malala Andrialavidrazana’s most recent series of works, an ongoing project initiated in 2015. In the present installation, the works are shown as large-scale projections. This is unusual; typically, they are displayed as physical prints over one meter in height. Overlays of 19th and 20th century maps, bank notes and stamps cut, reshaped and rethought by the artist, give rise in Figures to novel cartographies that speak powerful truth to power. Individually and as a unit, the resulting works highlight falsehoods inherent in the colonizing powers’ claim to objective and rational “knowledge” – to the North’s (ongoing) deployment of science as a weapon in the subjugation of peoples and territories. Clichés, pre- and misconceptions are at once subtly and incisively brought to the fore, as are fundamental misunderstandings as to how maps function and to what ends. The resulting works demand of the viewer that s/he (re)consider her position not only as a subject gazing at a work of art, but also as an actor in the forging of a world riven with the violence of power relations.

 

 

Figures 1853, Kolonien in Afrika und in der Süd-See, 2016.
Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Cotton Rag, 110 x 151,5 cm
© Malala Andrialavidrazana
Courtesy of the artist, 50 Golborne – London, Afronova – Johannesburg, C-Gallery –Milan, Kehrer – Berlin
Curated by SPARCK.

Adeela Suleman
20 / 20

Adeela Suleman

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

Adeela Suleman received her BFA from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi in 1999 and before that did her MA in International Relations from Karachi University in 1995. Currently Suleman is Associate Professor and Head of the Fine Art Department at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi and is Coordinator of Vasl Artists’ Association, Karachi. Suleman has exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at Gandhara Art Gallery, Karachi (2017); Aicon Gallery, New York, USA (2017); Davide Gallo Gallery, Milan, Italy (2017); Canvas Gallery, Karachi (2015); Aicon Gallery, New York, USA (2014); Canvas Gallery, Karachi; (2012); Alberto Peola Gallery, Turin, Italy (2012); Aicon Gallery, London, UK (2011); and Rohtas Gallery, Lahore (2008). She has also taken part in group exhibitions at notable Museums and foundations including, Pinakothek Der Morderne, Munich, Germany; Gaasbeek Castle Museum, Brussels, Belgium; A4 Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia;  Singapore Art Museum; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, USA; Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, India; and the Asia Society, New York, USA, among others. Her works are part of notable international public collections.

Adeela Suleman sees her works as biographical, in the sense that what she makes tells us something about who she is and where she comes from. She is deeply rooted in tradition, culture and religion, yet she is also acutely aware of the urban and political realities that surround her in modern day Karachi. In her work the formal and sociological aspects of these two parallel worlds come together as a poetic document to her life. Adeela Suleman draws attention to troubled sectarian and gang-led violence in Pakistan. Drawing from the tradition of Islamic art, Suleman moulds hardened steel and co-opts found objects to memorialize the countless killings within her country. Of her work on view at KB17, Suleman writes: “The continuous and escalating cycle of violence and unrest plaguing Pakistan is not only leaving its mark on the awareness and memories of individuals, but has begun seeping into every space and landscape of its citizens’ daily experiences and collective consciousness.”

Falling Down, 2012.
Stretcher, stainless steel, powder paint
185 x 350 x 13 cm.
Courtesy the artist

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