Venues

Karachi School of Art Gallery (KSA)

The Karachi School of Art has pioneered education in art and design in Karachi, being the city’s first art school, set up by the sculptor Rabia Zuberi in 1964. KSA has transformed its gallery into a space that can be utilized by contemporary artists to create visual dialogues. Exhibitions are held on a monthly basis, providing emerging artists with a platform to reach out to the public. Being a part of an educational institution, the gallery contributes by familiarizing students with the key issues emerging in contemporary Pakistani art, and the new critical methods which artists are using to engage with contemporary issues. Lectures and seminars are a regular feature, encouraging students to undertake an active consideration of artworks, while resisting simplistic conclusions and binary thinking.

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Participating Artists:

Izdeyar Setna /
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Izdeyar Setna

Born in 1977 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Toronto (Canada)

Izdeyar Setna received his Diploma (Photography) from New England School of Photography and Bachelor of Fine Arts (Photography) from Parsons School of Design, New York. He won first place in the American Society of Media Photography (ASMP) student competition in 2003 and also received the Judges’ Choice Award. BBC News selected Setna’s photograph to be part of their fifteen best images of 2004. In 2006, Christies auctioned his work for Nokia. Setna’s work was chosen to represent Pakistan at Chobi Mela, Bangladesh. In the Art of Photography Show, San Diego, USA in 2010, his photograph was one of those selected by Natasha Egan (Director and Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, USA). In 2012, Christies once again auctioned his photograph for Standard Chartered Bank for their theme “Seeing Is Believing” in Dubai. Two of Setna’s images will be included in the upcoming book Identities Now– a collection of best contemporary portrait photography selected from across the globe.

Izdeyar Setna has submitted three photographs for KB17. He states: “When you look closely at the images you will see a collage of numerous semi out-of-focus images. These numerous images create a face within a face that represents a human being who has seen, experienced and witnessed time. A witness is an observer, onlooker or even a spectator. The people in my photographs have been digitally manipulated with multiple images taken by me to create an illusion of what I have witnessed in the course of my life. These images are not meant to be clear. They're meant to create an illusion of what goes on in one's mind.”

 

Standing Boy, 2017.
Digital photograph on semi matt paper
76 x 102 cm.
Courtesy the artist

Muzzumil Ruheel /
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Muzzumil Ruheel

Born in 1985 in Lahore (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Muzzumil Ruheel graduated in 2009 as a visual artist from the Beacon House National University, Lahore. His work has been shown at Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai, UAE; Wip Konshtall, Stockholm, Sweden; “Still Exotic,” Collaborative Project, Cairo Documenta, Egypt; “Space Invader,” Aicon Gallery, London, UK; Grey Noise, Bastakiya Art Fair, Dubai, UAE; “Through Other Eyes,” Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry and The Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, Wales, UK; “Parallel Lines,” Cartwright Hall, Bradford City Art Gallery and Museum, UK; “Media as Medium,” UDK, Berlin, Germany and elsewhere. His work is part of several national and international collections.

Muzzumil Ruheel has created a work for KB17 involving a blackboard and text. He writes: “‘History Class’ is a compilation of extracts of my interactions as I fictionally live through history and its literature. I live somewhere within the history I read and I witness those documented events through my stories as a writer. I place myself within the different chapters of the past and I get to interact with all the major characters through the ages, back and forth, irrespective of a timeline. I live their truths, their realities and I realize the lies and contradictions through my fiction. Every account presented by history has multitudes of perspectives and what one sees or remembers is that which has been given importance and documentation while a lot of the small details are overlooked. My narrative is about that undocumented time, the stories and images before and after those documented narratives. One session in a history classroom has so much more to tell; there are so many stories and so many perspectives missing. If one were to try to justify this theory, there wouldn’t be enough time and space; the incessant flow of information would blacken pages, text over text over text, resembling a blackboard. The ambiguity in meaning is complemented by the darkness of ink and the text that hides in plain view and shines unexpectedly. The piece also includes the blackboard’s shadow made from shredded paper on the floor.”

History Class, 2016-17.
Acrylics and ink on canvas and shredded paper
467 x 243 cm.
Courtesy the artist

Max Papeschi /
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Max Papeschi

Born in 1970 in Milan (Italy)
Lives and works in Milan (Italy)

After working as a writer and director for theatre, TV and cinema, Max Papeschi turned his attention to digital-art. Since then, no political or cultural figure has been spared his scathing wit, whether it be Kermit the Frog, Josef Stalin, Mickey Mouse, Adolf Hitler or Hello Kitty. Papeschi has had numerous exhibitions all over the world.

Flavia Vago has written of Max Papeschi’s work on view at KB17: “In 2016 Max Papeschi realized his work IT’S ALL DEVO in digital animation technique for his friend and collector, Gerald Casale. Casale is a member of DEVO, a revolutionary American band that is a symbol of New Wave...Casale asked Papeschi to make a music video, which he did, in collaboration with Maurizio Temporin…[in it] a dystopian reality is presented; a mass of horrific characters who represent the most disturbing aspects of our contemporary age.”

Still from IT’S ALL DEVO, 2016.
Digital animation, 3:30 min.
Courtesy the artist
Curated by Paolo De Grandis.

Talal Faisal /
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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

Imran Channa /
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Imran Channa

Born in 1981 in Shikarpur (Pakistan)
Lives and works between Lahore (Pakistan) and Maastricht (The Netherlands)

Imran Channa completed his BFA at the National College of Arts, Lahore, wherefrom he also obtained an advanced degree in 2008. Channa’s work has been shown across the world in numerous exhibitions at venues such as: The House Mill, London; Marres Museum, Maastricht; and Artport, Tel Aviv, as well as international art fairs, including the Third International Festival of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Algeria and Art Basel Hong Kong. He has had solo shows at Koel Gallery (Karachi) and the Mohatta Palace Museum (Karachi), and received the ‘Award of Excellence’ by the Artists’ Association of Punjab in 2013. He is currently participating in an artistic-research residency program at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (The Netherlands), and teaches at the National College of Arts, Lahore. Channa’s primary artistic interest is in historical documentation; how it creates narratives and provides a vehicle for erasure, simultaneously a source of information and information. His multi-medial approach uses drawing, moving image, installation and digital technology as a means to re-examine historical documents and their influence, inviting audiences to contemplate the contradictions of how we record and understand history.

Imran Channa’s installation for the Karachi Biennale 2017, The Great Wall, explores the concept of the wall, not only as defining physical space but also confining ideologies, an embodiment of the dialectic tension between concealing and revealing. The project plays with the idea of creating a wall, used to establish and divide physical and ideological space on the basis of socio-political history, religion and culture. The disrupted nature of the physical manifestation of the installation explores questions of the constraints of context on the artistic process, treated by the artist as a metonym for the effect of socio-political conditions on creative thought and output more generally. Channa’s wall exists, like all walls, in a very specific, finite plane of time, as the artist himself says: “It explores and records the discursive traces of time.”

The Great Wall, 2017.
Installation
Dimensions variable

R.M. Naeem /
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R.M. Naeem

Born in 1968 in Mirpurkhas (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Upon completing his BFA in 1993 as a distinction student at the National College of Arts, Lahore, R.M. Naeem subsequently held the position of Assistant Professor there. In the past twenty-two years, he has held sixteen solo shows both in Pakistan and abroad and curated various important shows of local and international artists. In addition, his work has been exhibited in numerous important group shows both nationally and internationally, including: The Asian Art Biennale, Bangladesh (2004 and 2006); The International Artists' Biennale, Iran (2006); The Pyeongtack International Art Festival Lake Museum, South Korea (2006 and 2007); Art Expo Malaysia (2010); Slick Art Fair, France (2010); AAF Affordable Art Fair, Singapore (2011); India Art Fair (2014); and Jaipur Art Summit, India (2012 and 2014). Since 1994, he has been promoting art through art education at STUDIO RM in Lahore and In 2008 he initiated the Studio RM (International) Residency program, also in Lahore.

R.M. Naeem states of his practice: “I strongly believe that by using popular social issues or political imagery in painting one cannot resolve these issues…I do not aspire to add to the chaos by portraying these circumstances in my art. What I do is a total reversal, an opposite of what is happening. My subject is that of peace, love and hope; my scenario is a world of harmony, one lost to us that we must struggle to resuscitate.” For KB17 R. M. Naeem has depicted his own children in his painting Connection. He writes: “The work is about the bonding between siblings, where this relationship challenges the norms associated with age. The older one might think that he/she is a grown-up and has a certain authority and maturity, but it is challenged by the younger one constantly…Most of the time the younger one refuses to accept the established norms and demands equality in all matters. While at the same time the love and bonding prevail.”

Connection, (Diptych) 2017.
Acrylic on canvas
189 x 229 cm.
Courtesy the artist

Jesper Nordahl /
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Jesper Nordahl

Born in 1969 in Stockholm (Sweden)
Lives and works in Stockholm (Sweden)

Jesper Nordahl graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2000 and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York in 2007. His artistic practice addresses social, political and gender related issues. His works, which are mostly collaborative and context-based, reposition the artist as an agent and/or researcher who invents forms that constantly renegotiate art as a critical project. He uses not only video and sound, but a variety of media—such as photography, painting, text and public interventions -- to explore issues of art, image, representation and knowledge production. His works have been shown internationally, including exhibitions at Museum of Fine Arts (Galerija Umjetnina), Split; Shedhalle, Zurich; Artists Space, New York; Index, Stockholm; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Colombo Art Biennale, Colombo; and Dolores at EDB Projects, Amsterdam. He has also taken part in artist residencies at the Iaspis studio at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Theertha in Colombo, Nifca in Riga and at Iaspis in Stockholm.

Jesper Nordahl lived in Sri Lanka for two years as a teenager from 1982-1984, when his father worked at Skanska, which built the Kotmale dam, a controversial project both in Sweden and Sri Lanka, with funds from SIDA, the Swedish foreign aid agency. The video Katunayake Free Trade Zone, on view at KB17, is the most recent video in a series of projects that Nordahl has been working on in Sri Lanka from 2004 to the present. These works are based on collaborations with The Women’s Centre, which consists of women workers, the Free Trade Zones & General Services Employees Union, lawyers, academics and activists. They explore the politics of the Free Trade Zones and the Kotmale dam, which together with a series of other dams, were central parts of restructural policies initiated in Sri Lanka by the IMF and World Bank in the late 1970s.

Katunayake Free Trade Zone, 2015.
Black and white HD-video as projection, no sound, 15 min.
Courtesy the artist

Broersen & Lukács
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Broersen & Lukács

Live and work between Berlin (Germany) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands)

Margit Lukács (b, 1973, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) & Persijn Broersen (b. 1974, Delft, The Netherlands) are artists living and working between Amsterdam and Berlin. They work in a wide variety of media—most notably video, animation and graphics—producing a myriad of works that reflect on the ornamental characteristics of today's society. With video pieces that incorporate (filmed) footage, digital animation and images appropriated from the media, they demonstrate how reality, media and fiction are strongly intertwined in contemporary society. Broersen and Lukács studied at the Sandberg Institute and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.  Their films, installations and graphic work have been shown internationally, at a.o. Biennale of Sydney (Australia), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (the Netherlands), MUHKA (Belgium), Centre Pompidou (France), Shanghai World Expo (China), and Casa Enscendida (Spain).

Broersen & Lukács have two videos on view at KB17. In Establishing Eden, the artists focus on the establishment shot: the moment a landscape is identified and becomes one of the main protagonists in a film. In blockbusters like Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) and the film series Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001-2014) these shots have been used to capture and confiscate the nature of New Zealand, propagating itself as a new Eden, ever-green and unspoilt. Here fiction takes over reality: mountains and forests exist under the name of their cinematic alter-egos. Broersen & Lukács traveled through the wilderness of New Zealand to capture these landscapes and with that, they appropriate the nature of New Zealand once again. Creating an architecture of fragments connected by the camera-movement of a perpetual establishment shot, they show this Eden as a series of many possible realities, an illusion that just as easily comes together as it falls apart. In the second video, Stranded Present, the vertigo effect of time in today’s culture makes the present appear as if woven out of many pasts. Transformed, shifted or mutilated, historical motifs have found their home in the adornments of many past and future households. While searching for the strength and sustainability of certain patterns, Broersen & Lukács stumbled upon the 19th century illustrations of the ruins of Palmyra in the Parisian Bibliothèque Fornay, a library of decorative arts. They reconstructed this once flattened motif of a temple, depicting its endless dimensions—plastic, malleable and untouchable—as a liquid body, transforming over time. On the night of its first appearance in public, ISIS took control of the historic city of Palmyra and, with that, expropriated the meaning of Broersen & Lukács’ work. And, nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of this, the motif is again nestled in our brains, as a stream that, once settled in its bed, will flow on for ages.

Still from Stranded Present, 2015.
Video installation, 18 min. (loop)
Courtesy the artists

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