Seema Nusrat

Born in 1980 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Seema Nusrat trained as a sculptor at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi and later did her MFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Canada. She currently teaches at the Indus Valley as Associate Professor in the Fine Art Department. Her solo shows include: “Proposals Towards a New Architecture,” Gandhara Art Gallery, Karachi in 2017; “New Urban Landscape,” Koel Gallery, Karachi in 2016; “Items of Re-Use,” Canvas Gallery, Karachi in 2013; “Resuscitate,” Rohtas Gallery, Lahore in 2008 and “Body Without Body,” VM Art Gallery, Karachi in 2007. She has attended several residencies in Europe and Asia, notably JSW Abhisaran Residency, Vijayanagar, India in 2014; Can Serrat International Artist Residency Programme, El Bruc, Spain, in August 2009; Artist in Residence Programme of Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan in 2009; Gasworks International Residency, London in 2008; 3 Island Workshop, Scotland in 2008; Theertha International Artists’ Workshop, Sri Lanka in 2008 and VASL Residency, Karachi in 2007.

Of her work for KB17 Seema Nusrat writes: “Barricades, entrenchments and barriers that were introduced to cordon off areas during unrest in Karachi are now an integral part of the city’s landscape. The security infrastructure that looked alien at the time of its inception has become a regular feature at public spaces and government institutions. This could evoke fear and anxiety among denizens of Karachi but it could also be intertwined with the architecture such that it becomes a design element. Containing the Metropolis is a continuation of Proposals Towards a New Architecture, one which could meet requirements of a city in conflict while maintaining design aesthetics fit for a metropolis.”

Michelangelo Pistoletto

Born in 1933 in Biella (Italy)
Lives and works between Biella and Turin (Italy)

A leading figure in the development of Arte Povera and Conceptual art, Michelangelo Pistoletto is well known for his “mirror paintings” beginning in the 1960s, which first used grounds of metallic paint on canvas before rejecting canvas entirely for polished steel. In 2003 he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. At the same Biennale he presented Love Difference - Artistic Movement for an InterMediterranean Politic, a project born in April 2002 at Cittadellarte, for which Pistoletto made a large reflecting table in the shape of the Mediterranean basin, around which many of the subsequent activities of Love Difference took place. In 2004 Turin University graduated him with a laurea honoris causa in Political Science. On that occasion the artist publicly announced the most recent phase of his work, Third Paradise, whose symbol is a reconfiguration of the mathematical sign for infinity conceived by the artist in 2003. From 2007, with the collaboration between Pistoletto and the musician Gianna Nannini, curated by Zerynthia - RAM Radioartemobile, the Third Paradise evolved into a multimedia work in progress. In 2007, in Jerusalem, Pistoletto was awarded the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts, “for his constantly inventive career as an artist, educator and activist whose restless intelligence has created prescient forms of art that contribute to fresh understanding of the world.” In 2010 he wrote the essay The Third Paradise, published in Italian, English, French and German. In 2011 he was the artistic director of Evento 2011 – L'art pour une ré-évolution urbaine in Bordeaux. In 2012 he started promoting the Rebirth-day, first worldwide day of rebirth, celebrated every year on 21st December with initiatives taking place all around the world. In that same year he is bestowed the title of Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. In 2013 the Louvre in Paris hosted his personal exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto, année un – le paradis sur terre. In this same year he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting, in Tokyo. In 2014 the symbol of the Third Paradise was installed in the hall of the headquarters of the Council of the European Union in Brussels for the period of the Italian Presidency of the European Council.  In May 2015 he received a degree honoris causa from the Universidad de las Artes of Havana in Cuba for "his contribution to contemporary art and his influence on several generations of artists". In October of the same year he realizes a work, called Rebirth, in the park of the Palais des Nations in Geneva, headquarters of the UN, costituted of a huge symbol of the Third Paradise formed of 193 stones, one for each UN State Member.

Michelangelo Pistoletto states of his work for KB17: “The Third Paradise is the third stage of human society. The first is the ancestral stage dominated by nature, the second is the artificial stage dominated by art, science and technology. Today we are entering the third stage which will evolve in equilibrium between nature and artifice. Creating this equilibrium is the job we will do together, there is work for everyone."

Marco Nereo Rotelli

Born in 1955 in Venice (Italy)
Lives and works between Venice and Milan (Italy)

Marco Nereo Rotelli was trained in architecture in Venice. For years he has researched light and the poetic dimension, which Harald Szeemann has defined as “an expansion of the artistic contest.” He has worked with philosophers, musicians, photographers and film directors. But his primary interest remains in the relationship between art and poetry, which has become a constant reference in his work. In 2000 he founded the group Art Project, directed by Elena Lombardi and composed of young artists and architects; together they have realized numerous interventions and urban installation projects. Rotelli has participated in eight editions of the Biennale di Venezia, as well as numerous individual and collective exhibitions. His works are in important museums and private collections all over the world.

Marco Nereo Rotelli writes of his installation on view at KB17: “These long flags are spiritual and existential spaces. The way I see it, poetry is not just poetry for its rhymes and contents. From the art point of view, it is the possibility of visuals in the world of words, even a possibility to think the sound and the space in the time of a verse. These fabrics are like standards which wave the rights of humanity.”

Shahana Afaq

Born in 1991 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Shahana Afaq received her BFA with Distinction from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi in 2015. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout Karachi, at galleries including: Canvas Gallery; FOMMA; Alliance Française; VM Gallery; Koel Gallery; and Sanat Gallery. Internationally, she is currently part of the Imago Mundi Project, ‘White Turban’ in collaboration with the Luciano Benetton Foundation, and as part of such, her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale and Luciano Benetton ‘Imago Mundi’ collection, as well as the 8^th Cairo Festival. She also took part in the Box Print International Exchange Programme with COFA, Sydney. As a multi-medial artist, her technical practice strives to express her ideas throughout a wide-range of mixed media. Afaq describes the basis of her art practice as “Mushahadah”, which she defines as: “To look, to observe, and to gain experience with observation”, as seen in her constantly developing experiments with diverse media and aesthetics, each deliberately chosen to visually elaborate to the audience a specific experience, and how her conscious and subconscious observations have shaped this.

Afaq’s site-specific video installation, Let’s Celebrate, is a joyful expression of the spontaneity, innocence, energy and positivity that she experienced as a child. Within her work there is a phantasmagoria of different moments and sensory information that have been visually translated to create a kaleidoscopic homage to the beauty of childhood, and the nostalgia that comes with retrospection. The placement of the work, in a small, separate ceramic studio of the NJV School, provides the perfect space for Afaq’s video installation to enter into a rose-tinted reality – ‘simpler times’ – but also makes a poignant statement on the importance of art for children’s creative expression.

Arshad Faruqui/Nurayah Sheikh Nabi/Saba Iqbal

Arshad Faruqi (b. 1964, Karachi) graduated with a degree in architecture from the Dawood College of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, in 1988. He worked with renowned Architect Habib Fida Ali and then went on to receive his Master’s degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1992. He is a practicing architect, landscape designer and adjunct faculty member at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. He lives and works in Karachi. Nurayah Sheikh Nabi (b. 1971, Rawalpindi) graduated from the National College of Art, Lahore in 1993. Her work has been exhibited both internationally as well as within Pakistan. Her recent works have been shown internationally at the Venice Biennial 2017 as part of the Imago Mundi project and at the Deck Gallery, Singapore (2016) and at the Sharjah Museum (2015). She lives and works in Karachi. Saba Iqbal (b. 1970, Karachi) received her BFA from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVSAA) Karachi in 1994 and then went on to do a Graduate Diploma of Communications (Interactive Multimedia Technologies) from Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia in 2002. She has been part of the faculty at the IVSAA, Karachi since 2003 teaching sculpture and printmaking. Iqbal has participated in numerous shows both group and solo. She lives and works in Karachi.

 The artists write of the work they created for KB17: “Though rapidly dwindling, we occasionally witness the traditional, typical milk containers, stacked one on top of the other, jam packed on vans, carts and rickshaws and even on motorbikes. Varying in size and depending on their capacities, these containers once encountered on a daily basis are now just sporadic witnesses to, and a comment on, the past. They bring forward questions on old versus new, organic versus inorganic and pure versus adulterated. It is now a reality that packaged goods enjoy most of our attention and the milk industry too has raced towards the promise of hygiene and convenience. However, the illusion of health deceives the mind and pleases the eye with brightly colored boxes readily available at stores. Does this trend for consumerism have an expiry date?”

Zahid Mayo

Born in 1987 in Alipur Chatha (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Zahid Mayo was born in Alipur Chatha, a small town in Punjab, and moved with his family to the farming village of Madrassa Chatha when he was four years old. He started school there and learned calligraphy from the Takhti system that used to prevail in rural Punjab. Later on, his interest developed in drawing and poetry. The walls of the village were his early surfaces; pieces of chalk from school and left over bits of coal were his first materials. He moved to Lahore in 2005 to study art and, after graduating from the National College of Arts, began his career as an artist. His works can be seen in galleries and also in random places like trees, parks, roadsides, sometimes even on human bodies. 

Zahid Mayo states of his practice: “I am a storyteller and I believe that stories need not always be structured from words. I want to narrate stories through a visual form…I am a witness to those countless eyes who embarrass my own vision and to those faces that become an imprint on my subconscious. I am not able to face them directly so, with the help of my photography and sketch book, I let go of my subconscious. I cover my subject in the garb of traditional visual depiction to express my narrative onto the canvas.”

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.

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.”

Lala Rukh

1948 (Lahore, Pakistan) – 2017 (Lahore, Pakistan)
Lived and worked in Lahore (Pakistan)

Lala Rukh studied art at Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan (MFA) and University of Chicago, USA (MFA). She taught for 30 years at Punjab University, Department of Fine Art and at the National College of Arts, Lahore where she set up the MA (Hons) Visual Art Program in 2000. Rukh also trained in Islamic calligraphy and studied musical traditions from across the Indian subcontinent. She was actively engaged in archiving the All Pakistan Music Conference, which was initiated by her father, Hayat Ahmad Khan, in 1959. Rukh is primarily known for her drawings and print-based works, which reflect the patterns of both calligraphy and music. But she is equally recognized for her roles as an educator and activist for women’s rights. Beginning in the Zia regime (1977-1988), which was a particularly hostile one towards women, Rukh was a vocal member of the Women’s Action Forum. Her commitment to the disenfranchised never abated throughout her long career. Rukh’s shows include LISTE – Art Fair Basel 2017, Basel, Switzerland; “sagar,” Grey Noise, Dubai, UAE; “For an Image, Faster Than Light,” curated by Bose Krishnamachari, Yinchuan Biennial, Yinchuan, China; “but even if I cannot see the sun,” Grey Noise, Dubai, UAE; “The past, the present, the possible,” curated by Eungie Joo, Sharjah Biennial 12, Sharjah, UAE; and Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany. 

Hundreds of lawyers call out in unison for the independence of the judiciary under General Pervez Musharraf. Recorded during demonstrations in Lahore and Islamabad, the voices heard in this sound piece from 2008 (the title translates as “Dawn of Hope” in English) eulogize the struggle of the lawyers themselves, of women’s organizations, the media and student groups. Waves of urban sound succeed one another: morning rain and bird calls move into slogans and songs, ending in a classical ragga piece, upbeat and akin to a dance, performed by singer Sarah Zaman, an active participant in the demonstrations. As Rukh wrote to a friend at the time of the lawyers’ protests, which began in 2007, “This movement has truly captured the imagination of the people. It has given rise to poetry and graphics, slogans and slogan leaders who can carry on adlibbing nonstop for 15-20 minutes. One slogan leader is a woman lawyer who when she starts walks backwards, facing the demonstrators, and never falters either in her step or the rhythm of the slogans."

Sarah Revoltella

Born in 1971 in Geneva (Switzerland)
Lives and works in Venice (Italy)

The performance Io Combatto ("I Fight") arises from the idea that the artist can flip the destructive function of weapons by destroying weapons in turn. The “object” that has been created with the purpose of destroying the life of men reveals itself at the end to be an empty crock, broken and unusable as the wreckage of houses, villages, environments which remain the only evidence, the only "survivors" of bombings. Breaking weapons into a thousand pieces symbolically evokes the madness that results from the ephemeral act of killing and destroying “for its own sake”. The work starts with the ceramic exact replica of a number of weapons that are used in contemporary wars (machine guns, pistols, mines, rifles, etc.). The artist, with the help of experienced potters, created this small arsenal. The performance consists then of the exhibition of weapons to the public: each weapon is illustrated and explained in detail in all its specific and lethal characteristics. During the second part of the performance, the weapons are destroyed by the artist who creates a sort of "symbolic bombing" where the weapons, and not mankind, are the objects of destruction. The broken pieces that remain on the ground form the final work. At the end of the performance, the only visible ruins are formed by the weapons themselves, that will operate a symbolic “upside down” of the "natural” purpose they were created for. Eventually the broken pieces are installed / planted like flowers in a meadow.

Video documentation of Sarah Revoltella’s Io Combatto will be reshown at KB17. The original simultaneous performance was curated by Olga Gambari and made in collaboration with Terzo Paradiso, the foundation Pistoletto and the support of Veneto Region, the municipality of Nova, the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Nova, Vicenza province and the city of Venice. The performance artists were: Sarah Revoltella (Venice); Hermes Zaigott (Moscow); Burçak Konukman (Istanbul); Sean Donovan (New York); Sara Pagganwala (Karachi); and Colette Nucci (Paris).

Saba Khan

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

Saba Khan completed her BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, (Distinction), and MFA from Boston University, on a Fulbright Scholarship. Synthesising painting and object-making in her art practice, her work is saturated with satirical humour, exploring class divisions and proscribed social structures through layers of endemic aesthetics, yet without sermonising or moralisation. Connotative visual motifs characterise her acerbic commentary on socio-political conditions, exemplified by her use of gaudy palettes, glitter and diamantes to comment on the upper-classes, along with the ceremonial, residential and mercantile ostentatiousness that they display. Khan has exhibited her work throughout the world, including: SAVAC, Toronto; the Khatmandu International Art Festival; the Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai; the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre; the Affordable Art Fair, New York; the India Art Fair; and the Aicon Gallery, New York, as well as two solo exhibitions at Canvas Gallery, Karachi and at Taseer Gallery, Lahore. She has participated in a wide variety of residencies, and is a published writer. Currently, she teaches at her alma-mater, the National College of Arts, and founded the Murree Museum Artists’ Residency, an artist-led initiative to support artists and writers, in 2014.

The title of Saba Khan’s sculptural installation for the Karachi Biennale 2017, [Begum-sahiba after her diet ] Sheer-Maal – Sweet Delights, inspired by the eponymous pastry-like flatbread implying a certain dietary decadence, epitomises her culturally-attuned, incisive satire. Khan appropriates and vulgarises the embellished frames of Punjabi-Baroque chairs, yet their voluptuous mass, almost bursting at the seams, becomes a burden of their own excess. The subtle acidulousness of Khan’s satire means that the bloated chairs not only symbolise elite authority and excess - the kitsch, blushing pink stuffing and the meretricious frames also reference the exhibitionistic excess and elitism of the emerging nouveau-riche, synthesising an acute commentary on the class divide.

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 10^th Asian Biennale, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2002), 2^nd 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.”

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.

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.

Arif Mahmood

Born in 1960 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Arif Mahmood is a photographer specialising in photojournalism, portraiture and fashion. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Otterbein College, Ohio. Upon his return to Karachi in 1985, he took up photography, and within five years he was contributing editorial work for all major Pakistani publications. International publications that have published his work include: Newsweek; Khaleej Times; Gulf News; Arabian Woman Magazine; and Private Magazine. Arif has 27 publications to his credit, and had had 14 solo exhibitions in Pakistan and abroad, to date. He has also participated in 56 group shows nationally and internationally, and his photographs are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His art practice is very much based in his professional interests, combining aspects of photojournalism, fashion photography and portraiture in his work.

His photographic collage, Balochistan Earthquake 2008, comprises of 15 black and white photos taken whilst covering the Ziarat Earthquake in early November 2008. Rather than capturing the devastation and destruction that ensued following the 6.4 magnitude earthquake, Arif has focused on the human aspect of the natural disaster. Subverting the viewer’s expectations, his beautifully shot monochrome photographs do not portray images of human distress and pain, rather, they depict the pure resilience of human spirit in the face of such adversity. The figures in his photographs act as metonyms for the greater plight of all those affected and displaced by the earthquake, yet the viewer comes away from the work with a distinct sense of optimism, due to the positivity and fortitude that radiates from the various players on Arif’s photographic stage.

Nausheen Saeed

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

Nausheen Saeed obtained her BFA in Sculpture at the National College of Arts, Lahore before acquiring her MFA in Site Specific Sculpture from Wimbledon School of Art, London. She currently works as an Associate Professor at the National College of Arts, Lahore teaching sculpture in the Department of Fine Arts. Her work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, as well as having been shown in five solo exhibitions at galleries in Pakistan, such as: Rohats 2, Lahore; and Canvas Gallery, Karachi. Her work is part of a number of private and public collections, including: World Bank, Washington; Levi’s Pakistan, Lahore; National College of Arts, Lahore; Toyota Tsusho, Tokyo. Saeed’s feminist art practice sculpturally takes the body as the site of contention, conflict and controversy. Her work celebrates the female body, extricating her figures from the residue of the male gaze so that they exist as independent entities, proclaiming their individuality as their strength.

In her sculptural installation for the Karachi Biennale 2017, Saeed simultaneously explores the prevalence of violence in our society by using technology as an analogous visual metaphor. The dialogue created by her pair of sculptures, two identical female figures placed in separate cubicles of mirrors, one taking a ‘selfie’, the other holding a handgun to her head, represents a cutting critique of the contemporary commonplace, assimilating the pervasiveness of smartphones to that of guns, the ubiquity of ‘selfies’ to that of violence. The complexity of the statement made by Saeed’s work goes beyond the ostensible simplicity of its visual analogy; it excoriates both component parts – the gun and the smartphone, the process of taking a ‘selfie’ and shooting a gun. The latent insinuation of the work suggests that by our narcissistic obsession with online self-presentation, we are collectively partaking in a form of violence against our individual selves.

Sebastián Díaz Morales

Born in 1975 in Comodoro Rivadavia (Argentina)
Lives and works in Amsterdam (The Netherlands)

Sebastián Díaz Morales was reared in an isolated place between the Atlantic Ocean and the Patagonian Desert. He believes his upbringing led him to a particular way of perceiving reality. He uses a number of different formal strategies to create his videos, ranging from the digital manipulation of appropriated news clips to lengthy, film-like narrative works made from footage filmed by himself. Díaz Morales explores the relationship between large-scale socio-political power dynamics and individual action in works that create a sense of uneasiness for the viewer. His films are often surreal, establishing a tension between a depicted social reality and its representation in a visually abstract or phantasmagorical way. Throughout his works, multiple forms of dependence are explored, including interdependent relationships between people, the environment and social structures. Díaz Morales’ works can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Fundación Jumex, Mexico; Sandretto Foundation, Turin; Constantini Collection, Buenos Aires; Pinault Foundation, Paris; Sammlung-Goetz, Munich; and the Fundacion de Arte Moderna, Museo Berardo, Lisbon, among others.

Pasajes I and II are the first two films in a series of four. In the two videos included in KB17, a lone man, played by Federico Zukerfeld, opens doors, climbs stairs and ladders, walks corridors and turns corners. Like a sleepwalker, he searches the interior spaces of Buenos Aires for a seemingly elusive destination. In the videos, Buenos Aires, which appears at times both shabby and elegant, reveals itself to be an endless maze in which an alternative image of the viewer can potentially materialize. As Díaz Morales states, “These works, its surroundings and characters picture at first a reality that sometimes can be interpreted as oneiric or dreamlike. Another way to see them is by thinking of them in the opposite way: The characters who populate these realms are those who envision us; I see our reality being dreamed by them and in their dreaming, shaping our world.”

Richard Humann

Born in 1961 in Suffern, NY (USA)
Lives and works in New York (USA)

Richard Humann is a New York City-based neo-conceptual artist. His work has been exhibited at the Kemi Art Museum, the Tampere Art Museum, the Aine Art Museum, Museo Cristóbal Gabarrón, the Macao Art Museum, the Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, the Youngeun Museum of Art, and the Kaohsiung Museum of Art, among other institutions. Much of his work is considered to be minimal, not so much in the art historical sense, but in that he strips away what he feels is not necessary to tell the story of the piece. His goal is to have the art that he creates read like poetry. He wants it to be a short distillation of a concept that touches not only the heart, but the mind as well. That is the thread that runs throughout his work, whether in drawings, sculptures, videos or installations. Language, words, dissected letters, codes and visual metaphors often become the mechanism for the dissemination of his intent.

For his installation for KB17, A Tide of Credence, Humann revisited his 2013 work, The Same River Twice, in which he took a map of the Hudson River (on the banks of which he was born and raised) from its head north of Albany, New York to its eventual flowing out past the island of Manhattan. He then transposed the shape onto a large pedestal and cut the river out from it. He gathered many of the writings that inspired him from his youth, including excepts from The Brothers Karamazov, The Sirens of Titan, Sweet Thursday, Gulliver’s Travels, as well as from poems by e.e. cummings, among other works, and then filled the shape of the river up with the words of excerpts that he had disassembled. These writings were the inspiration that led the artist to move to New York City so many years ago. As Humann states, “The river lifted me up and floated me downstream, where I began my life as an artist.” Like New York, Karachi is a city of migrants. In A Tide of Credence for KB17, he has recreated the Indus River with its tributaries that flow down through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. He asked Pakistani immigrants living in New York to write down their hopes, dreams, and beliefs in their native Urdu. He then cut up the written text in an effort to reduce it to its purest meaning and placed it into the riverbed. He also took excerpts from poetry, history and literature, both historical and contemporary, and did the same. This collection of personal and collective accounts flows with the tide of the river, from its northern, eastern and western borders, and works its way south, towards Karachi.

Seher Naveed

Born in 1984 in Quetta (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Seher Naveed was awarded a BFA from the Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture in 2007 and an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London in 2009. She has shown in various local and international exhibitions and is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Art at the Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture, Karachi. She also initiated an ongoing research project called “Drawing Documents” that looks at various drawing practices as research.

Seher Naveed’s curiosity lies in temporary barricades and obstructions that are a constant feature in the urban growth of Karachi. Interested in urban geography, she views these barriers as additions, subtractions and alterations to our everyday movement. She sees these as superimposed architectural spaces that appear and disappear, slowly becoming part of everyday banal objects. Of her work on view at KB17, entitled The New Gate, the artist writes: “For the past couple of months I have been interested in documenting the gates seen in Karachi’s residential areas. I feel the city’s uncertain security situation reflects in their layered construction, making these gates function more as barriers and defenses in which we protect and barricade ourselves. These new gates of Karachi, which are ornamented with iron spikes and barbed wire, are not meant to welcome one in; in fact, they require a password, camera surveillance and credentials.”   

Haamid Rahim

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

Haamid Rahim, aka Dynoman, has been contributing to Karachi's counter-culture music scene since the age of 13. He has played with bands, side projects and began the "Dynoman" moniker in 2009. He co-founded, and continues to run, Pakistan's premiere electronic music record label, Forever South. Rahim has a Bachelor’s from Penn State and a Master’s from Carnegie Mellon.

Rahim writes of his sound work for KB17: “Set in New York City, Talking in Transit highlights the immigration process via audio scenes. The piece captures questions, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and conversations which are prevalent throughout the immigration application, and the piece was inspired by Pakistanis living in New York. The field recordings used are recorded in various parts of New York City and Upstate New York.”

Althea Thauberger

Born in 1970 in Saskatoon (Canada)
Lives and works in Vancouver (Canada)

Althea Thauberger took degrees in photography and studio arts at Concordia University (2000) and the University of Victoria (2002), and studied media philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee Switzerland (2009/10). She has taught art and theory in many post secondary institutions including Simon Fraser University, Vancouver; Concordia University, Montreal; and the Art Academy of Prague. She is currently a guest lecturer in the Liberal Arts Program at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi. Working in photography, film/video and performance, her practice is concerned with collaborative possibilities of the social documentary form. Her recent film projects have involved research and engagement with particular sites and their communities to generate a performance-based narrative. The resulting films reflect on social, political and institutional power relations and present situations in which these dynamics may be challenged or break down. Her screenings and exhibitions include the Audain Gallery, Vancouver; the 2012 Liverpool Biennale; the 17th Biennale of Sydney; La musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; The National Gallery of Canada; The Berkeley Art Museum; Manifesta 7; Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; BAK, basis voor aktuele kunst, Utrecht; The Power Plant, Toronto; and the 3rd Guangzhou Triennale among many others. She is represented by Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto. 

Althea Thauberger has two works on view at KB17: a photograph entitled “Who is that cane tell me who I am?” and a digital film paired with a painted movie billboard. The film features the built environment of Capri Cinema's modernist architecture and its security modifications, along with a cast of approximately 200 extras. The Capri is one of only two remaining single screen projection houses remaining in Saddar, Karachi's city centre, and it remains a fully functioning cinema despite many difficulties and attacks, including a mob fire attack in 2012. The cast of the film will be drawn from the cinema's existing patrons as well as from the diverse community of residents directly surrounding the site. The scenes are generated through a workshopping process and will relate to the remarkable history of the site.

Yoko Ono

Born in 1933 in Tokyo (Japan)
Lives and works in Nutopia

Yoko Ono is an artist whose thought-provoking work challenges people’s understanding of art and the world around them. From the beginning of her career, she was a Conceptualist whose work encompassed performance, instructions, film, music, and writing.

Ono was born in Tokyo in 1933, and moved to New York in 1953, following her studies in philosophy in Japan. By the late 1950s, she had become part of New York Cityʼs vibrant avant-garde activities. In 1960, she opened her Chambers Street loft, where she and La Monte Young presented a series of radical performances and exhibited realizations of some of her early conceptual works. In 1961, she had a one- person show of her Instruction Paintings at George Maciunas’ legendary AG Gallery in New York, and later that year, she performed a solo concert at Carnegie Recital Hall of revolutionary works involving movement, sound, and voice. In 1962, she returned to Tokyo, where, at the Sogetsu Art Center, she extended her New York performance and exhibited her Instructions for Paintings. In 1964, Ono performed Cut Piece in Kyoto and Tokyo, and published Grapefruit, a book of her collected conceptual instruction pieces. At the end of that year, she returned to New York. In 1965, she performed Cut Piece during her concert at Carnegie Recital Hall, Bag Piece during a solo event for the Perpetual Fluxus Festival, and she performed Sky Piece to Jesus Christ during the Fluxorchestra concert at Carnegie Recital Hall that September. In 1966, she made the first version of Film No. 4 (Bottoms), and realized a collaborative installation The Stone, at the Judson Gallery. In the fall of 1966, she was invited to take part in the Destruction in Art Symposium in London, and later that year, held one-person exhibitions at the Indica Gallery, and the Lisson Gallery the following year. During this period, she also performed a number of concerts throughout England. In 1969, together with John Lennon, she realized Bed-In, and the worldwide War Is Over! (if you want it) campaign for peace. Ono has made a number of films, including Fly and Rape, and many records, including Fly, Approximately Infinite Universe, Rising, and Between My Head and the Sky. She has had numerous exhibitions in museums throughout the world, including traveling exhibitions organized by the Museum of Modern Art Oxford and the Japan Society in New York. In 2009, she exhibited ANTONʼS MEMORY at the Bevilacqua Foundation in Venice, and received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Biennale. Among numerous recent exhibitions, in 2010, she exhibited IʼLL BE BACK at the Studio Stefania Miscetti in Rome, and DAS GIFT at the Haunch of Venison in Berlin. In 2011, she showed participatory installation pieces at the Wanås Foundation in Sweden, and the Yokohama Triennale, and held four one-person exhibitions in Tokyo, New York, and Hiroshima, including Road of Hope—Yoko Ono 2011 at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, where she was honored with the prestigious 8th Hiroshima Art Prize for her dedicated peace activism. In 2013, YOKO ONO: HALF-A-WIND SHOW – A RETROSPECTIVE opened at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, which then traveled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Kunsthalle Krems in Austria, and Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. YOKO ONO: ONE WOMAN SHOW, 1960-1971 opened at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in May 2015. In the fall of 2015, Ono had one-person exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT) and the FAURSCHOU FOUNDATION BEIJING, as well as a major retrospective at MAC Lyon in France. In October 2016, Ono unveiled her permanent installation SKYLANDING in Chicago’s Jackson Park, and her one-person exhibition at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece, was warmly received. Currently, Ono’s work is featured at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC in her exhibition YOKO ONO: Four Works for Washington and the World. Three of her installations will be running concurrently in Venice: MIRROR IMAGE at Palazzo Mora, ‘EX IT Destruction’ at Palazzo Michiel, and INVISIBLE PEOPLE on the Lido. Other current and upcoming exhibitions include her one-person exhibition YOKO ONO: VOICE OF A WOMAN at Galerie Ziegler, Zurich, and a group exhibition Duet with Artist. Participation as Artistic Principle at Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany, which then travels to 21her Haus in Vienna. In 2007, she created the permanent installation IMAGINE PEACE TOWER on Viðey Island, Iceland, and continues to work tirelessly for peace with her IMAGINE PEACE campaign.

ONOCHORD

Send the ONOCHORD message:

“I LOVE YOU”

by repeatedly blinking the light

in the frequencies and durations

required for the message:

from ships

from the top of the mountains

from buildings

using whole buildings

in town squares

from the sky

and to the sky.

Keep sending the message

until the end of the year

and beyond.

Keep sending the message

everywhere on the earth

and to the universe

keep sending.

For individuals:

send the message by hand

or using flashlights

or with lighters

The message I LOVE YOU in ONOCHORD is:

I             i

LOVE    ii

YOU      iii

I love you !

yoko ono  2004

Meher Afroz

Born in 1948 in Lucknow (India)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Meher Afroz’s reputation as a prolific printmaker and painter reflects modernity rooted in a  traditionalist approach to image-making. Afroz completed her undergraduate studies in fine arts from the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Lucknow, India in 1971. She began her formal art practice in the early ’70s. She has drawn much appreciation and critical acclaim for her printmaking and painting. She is one of the foremost printmakers of her generation. Some of her most important series are The Mask and Puppet, (1988-89), Portrait (1990-91), Amulet (1992-3), Zindaan (2001), Pindaar (2002-3), Dastaavez (2007), Naqsh-bar-Aab (2012), and others. Her career spans a modernist approach that encompasses the abstraction of the picture plane into a layering of the surface, embedded with imagery and text. She was awarded the Pride of Performance by the government of Pakistan in 2015. Afroz co-founded ASNA in 1998, a collective for research, exhibition and dialogue of the local kumbhar, or clay artisan, with the mainstream studio potter/artist. She has taught art at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi as well as workshops and short-term classes at the Central Institute of Arts and Crafts, Karachi. She has a long list of national and international exhibitions.

 Meher Afroz responds to the theme of Witness in an abstract and non-literal manner, reflecting her larger art practice since the 1970s. As one in dialogue with the social through an indirect critique, the artist has constantly been bearing testimony to the value system in her surroundings. The questions that arise out of this dialogue between self and society question the legitimacy of narratives both in and outside the art world. The suspended masnad evokes an enquiry into many levels of witness, and provides a space to seek the physical and spiritual manifestation of its form. Bearing in mind its references in historical text and practices, this is an object of mediation, desire and holds the promise of a reward. The beauty associated with the richness of color and zardozi on textile provides a momentary anchor to reflect on the existing nature of shared spaces, dialogues and their subtext.

Eléonore Hellio

Born in 1966 in Paris (France)
Lives and works in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo)

In collaboration with Huguette Kilembi, Emery Mohamba, Blaise Mandefu, Irène Kamba, Mbuku Kimpala, Matthieu Kasiama, Jean Kawata, Mao Kinguza, Daniel Mumvunzi, Cedrick Tamasala. Eléonore Hellio’s interest in electronic arts arose in the beginning of the 1990s, when she became one of the main co-operating artists of the Electronic Café International. Today as an artist and a teacher, she develops open creative systems and educational programs in various contexts with numerous partners, most of whom are based on the African continent. Network Art, with or without technology, is at the heart of her practice. Since 1996, Hellio has been teaching art and media at the Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin in Strasbourg and, since 2006, at Kinshasa’s Académie des Beaux-Arts. She organizes workshops, makes films, installations, performances and publishes texts and photographic work, as a solo practitioner and in collaboration with numerous life professionals, notably in the context of Kongo Astronauts, a collective that she founded in 2013 with performance artist Michel Ekeba. Simultaneously, she is involved in a wide range of art and research projects bringing together international thinkers around questions relating to the impact of digital globalization and challenges posed by the postcolonial era. On a regular basis, she collaborates with SPARCK, a multi-platform, experimental Pan-African curatorial platform, and has established the eternalnetwork.org hub.

Eléonore Hellio’s video Upside Down World is on view at KB17. Hellio herself, at pains to underscore that this is a collective work, elaborated with ten artists based in Lusanga whom she led in a 2016 workshop, explains that the video was filmed on the grounds of an ongoing project with which she has been closely associated. Initiated in 2014 by Dutch artist Renzo Martens in Lusanga, on a cacao plantation owned by the US conglomerate Unilever, the project bears the name CATPC (Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise). In part, the work is a response to the presence on the project site of an artwork by German artist Carsten Höller: a set of goggles that allow those who wear them to see the world upside down.  Well known on the Euro-American contemporary art scene, Höller’s goggles were discussed at length by the workshop participants as a metaphor for the “North’s” misreading of Congolese lives and experiences.

ORLAN

Born in 1947 in Saint-Étienne (France)
Lives and works in Paris (France)

ORLAN is one of the most famous French artists internationally known. She creates sculptures, photographs, performances, videos, videogames and augmented reality, using scientific and medical techniques like surgery and biogenetics. Those are only mediums for her; the idea prevails and the materiality pursues. ORLAN makes her own body the medium, the raw material, and the visual support of her work. It takes place as the “public debate.” She is a major figure of body art and of “carnal art,” as she defined it in her 1989 manifesto. Her commitment and her liberty are integral parts of her work. She defends innovative, interrogative and subversive positions in all of her artwork.

On view at KB17 are photographs from ORLAN’s African Self-Hybridatization and Precolumbian Self-Hybridization series. Shelley Rice has written of these series: “The Pre-Columbian Self-Hybridizations (1998) are in color, and mix her face with those carved on ancient sculptures, leaving her skin rough-hewn and stony. The second, African Self- Hybridizations (2000), use nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs (always in black and white) as their models, and superimpose (often extreme) African facial decorations and deformations onto ORLAN’s contemporary European visage. The Self-Hybrdization pictures are, in fact, masquerades: travels in time to distant places, cultural displacements into what Pierre Restany has called ‘a collision of times’. There is, of course, a lineage to these series: in works as diverse as Hannah Hoch's Ethnographic Museum collages from the 1920s and Wangechi Mutu’s fantastic woman-beasts of today, female artists have expressed their fractured and symbiotic relationship with the Other. ORLAN’s Self-Hybridizations are neither anthropolical nor expressive in a surrealist way. They are, instead, arenas for action and inquiry, allowing her to explore the limits of the face, of physical « branding » and expression in a global world where the boundaries of time and culture must by necessity be stretched and redrawn. An extension of her previous work, the Self-Hybridizations mark the ways in which self-presentation forges identity and relationships in an increasingly interconnected world, where people, traditions, and images are continually on the move. Contemporary art has recently caught up with ORLAN, in its dialogs about refugees, displacements, and hybrid identities.”

Guido van der Werve

Born in 1977 in Papendrecht (The Netherlands)
Lives and works in Berlin (Germany)

Guido van der Werve was raised playing classical piano, but changed to visual arts later in life. He studied Audio Visual Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in 2006 & 2007. He was also part of the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York, 2008, and resident at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, in 2011. Van der Werve initially started out as a performance artist, but unwilling to perform live and more than once, he began to document his performances. Developing this practice, he quickly got interested in film and cinematography, where he found an emotional directness similar to music, which he saw missing in visual arts. The key element of his works is still performance, but he adds music, text, sport and atmospheric scenes as returning elements. His works are characterized by long meditative shots and a refusal to work with actors. Since 2007 he has composed his own music. Van der Werve has created fifteen elaborate works, which have been exhibited and screened widely, finding recognition in both the art and film worlds. He has received many awards including the Volkskrant Beeldende kunst prijs in 2007, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2008, the Prix International d’Art Contemporain of the Foundation Prince Pierre de Monaco in 2010, the Charlotte Koehler Prijs from the Prins Bernhard Cultuur Fonds in 2012 and the Grand Prix (Gouden Kalf) for best short film at the Netherlands Film Festival in 2013. Van der Werve’s works have been exhibited extensively in venues such as the Kunsthalle Basel, MoMA/PS1, the Venice Biennale, Performa, the Moscow Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial and Manifesta. His works have been acquired by leading museums and institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Goetz Collection in Munich, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, The Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, The Boymans Museum in Rotterdam and the MWOODS museum in Beijing.

 Tom Morton has written of Guido van der Werve’s video on view at KB17: “Here, we see the artist walking steadily across the frozen waters, while behind him looms a vast ship, its prow smashing through the ice, then rearing up like a monstrous killer whale. Filmed in longshot, van der Werve seems frail and tiny, forever about to be swallowed by the abyss opening up behind him, forever hearing its great creaks, gulps and rumbles ringing in his ears. The icebreaker, though, lags continually behind, and we get to thinking about the effortlessness of his passage when compared to that of the behemoth to his rear. We might read it as a parable of man’s superiority to machine, until we remember that without the protective shell of the ship, van der Werve would never have been able to reach this inhospitable zone in the first place. This is not an image of man at one with nature, then, but of an excessive survival strategy, both sublime and ridiculous.”

Jibran Shahid

Born in 1992 in Islamabad (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Rawalpindi (Pakistan)

Jibran Shahid is a multidisciplinary artist who works with drawing, painting and sculpture, specialising in the latter, to which he often applies ceramic techniques, with a particular interest in the medium of porcelain. He obtained his BFA from the National College of Arts, Rawalpindi in 2016, and his work has been exhibited locally. Shahid’s art practice is based in an exploration of classical beauty, from which point he deconstructs and then reassembles the basic component parts to create singular forms of hybridity.

Shahid’s artistic practice is epitomised by his ceramic sculpture for the Karachi Biennale 2017 entitled, Embrace of Death 2. By merging anatomical elements of the horse and the human figure, the artist develops the idea that the horse is an icon of human civilisation; at once befriended, domesticated, idolised and exploited by man, the hybrid form visually represents the cross-species entanglement. The highly-stylised form, deliberately exaggerated in parts, establishes the connection with the equine strength and power that has fascinated and inspired mankind throughout art history, and human history more generally. The evolution of the work’s hybrid form perfectly captures the aspects of the horse which have eternally characterised it as an expression of certain desiderata of human nature: unadulterated dynamism; aesthetic satisfaction; and spiritual aspiration.

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.”

Kongo Astronauts

Born Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo), 2013.
Live and practice where time and place allow

Brought into being in 2013 by artists based in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kongo Astronauts navigates the vertigo of multiple, parallel worlds. Faced with the violence of today’s robotically enhanced planet, Kongo Astronauts responds with art. Never fixed – for it is a collective whose membership is ever in flux – Kongo Astronauts builds upon differences and upon the confrontation of diverse experiences, corralled, all, in an attempt to resist the psychological ghettos that characterize lives lived in the postcolonial era. Kongo Astronauts manifests in the interzones of digital globalization, wherein past, present and future collide, impacting politics of intimacy and identity in urban and rural settings alike. At work and play in the field of post-disciplinary action, Kongo Astronauts materializes in cosmic appearances and polysemic fictions (performances, films, texts, photos…), immersing viewers/listeners/bystanders in a multidimensional engagement with the experience of exile and the quest for survival.

SPARCK has chosen to show three films by the Kongo Astronauts collective, all associated with a series titled Postcolonial Dilemna. All three speak to the artists’ refusal to take at face value the world they inhabit and their insistence on seeking out alternative ways of engaging with and bypassing its political, economic and psychological violence. The third film, Postcolonial Dilemna Track #03 (Unended) is properly oneiric. An astronaut ambles through a tropical forest, making his (her?) way toward a massive waterfall. The astronaut is a key protagonist in several of the collective’s “works”:  unscripted performances in the streets of Kinshasa, an ever-expanding series of photographs by Kongo Astronauts and by others, films such as the one seen here, music videos (for example by Congolese rapper Baloji and new and upcoming Kinshasa-based group Mbongwana Star). The astronaut is a perplexing persona, unnamed, mysterious, ever changing, as the artists transform her/his appearance. Here, the notion of the cyborg exits the realm of science fiction to enter that of the every-day world, questioning in richly poetic image-ways terms of engagement with a post-capitalist order determined to do away with such exquisite spaces as the landscape the astronaut is traversing.   

Yaminay N. Chaudhri

Born in 1979 in Karachi (Pakistan)
Lives and works between Karachi and Guilford, CT (USA)

Yaminay N. Chaudhri has a degree in architecture from Cornell University and worked as an architect for six years before making a career switch. She got her MFA in combined media studio arts from State University of New York at Albany and then moved back to Karachi where she established the Tentative Collective in 2011. Since then, she has been making work collaboratively as well as on her own, focusing on digital media and socially engaged practice. She has attended the Vermont Studio Centre and Jentel artist residencies. Her individual and collaborative work have been shown in various museums, galleries and festivals internationally including Gandhara Artspace (Karachi), Twelve Gates Arts (Philadelphia), University Art Museum (Albany), Kunstraum Bethanien (Berlin), Syracuse International Film Festival, Digital Marrakech Festival, City Possible Film Festival (Singapore), IAWRT Asian Women's Film Festival (New Delhi), among others.

Yaminay N. Cahudhri’s submissions for KB17 include a 7-minute video, salvaged text from real estate advertisements, and a series of digital prints entitled “What is separation's geography? Everything is just that mystery." Of her prints, one of which is pictured here, the artist states: “The title of this series of prints comes from a book of poems by Agha Shahid Ali, Rooms Are Never Finished. It conjures up the viscerality of separation and distance from home, from the perspective of a poet in exile. In the context of this series of prints, the separation referred to is more local but the implied distance may be as vast. Before the viewer are profiles of large suburban homes filled with the textures and details of their walls. Floating in fields of white, the flattening of these homes and removal from their original contexts offer meditations on distance, separation, and perspectives of living in Karachi.”

Aamir Habib

Born in 1978 in Kohat (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Originally from Kohat, a small city in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Northern Pakistan, Aamir Habib graduated from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, in 2003. Specialising in sculpture, his work has been exhibited locally and internationally at venues such as: Canvas Gallery, Karachi; Koel Gallery, Karachi; ArtChowk the Gallery, Karachi; the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture Gallery; Carbon12Dubai; and AB Gallery, Luzern. His work has also been shown at multiple art fairs, including: Scope Basel 2013, 2014; Abu Dhabi Art Fair 2013; and the Moscow Biennale 2014. His sculptures, installations and digital works, whilst ostensibly light-hearted and playful, are a satirical investigation and articulation of the ubiquitous socio-political paradoxes and contradictions in society. His art practice does not aim to make definitive statements, but rather to question, and comment on the abundant social, political and cultural inconsistencies and ruptures that have been caused by the powers that be, with little regard for the collateral damage caused to the affected civilian communities.

Habib’s sculptural installation for the Karachi Biennale 2017, Already Eaten, comprising of a taxidermied donkey and two television screens, is an homage to the working poor of Pakistan. Much like in Orwell’s Animal Farm, the hard-working horse, Boxer, is an allegorical representation of the Soviet proletariat, Habib’s donkey symbolises the working-class who, in the artist’s words, “have stretched themselves on hollow praise and broken promises since the dawn of independence.” The two television screens, playing the sound of people clapping, are a visual metaphor for the “hollow praise and broken promises” that give assurances of a brighter future, but never deliver, creating a system which negates social mobility.

Ayessha Quraishi

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

Ayessha Quraishi is a self-taught painter. She received her initial art training from Karachi-based educator Nayyar Jamil. Her solo shows include “Open Presence,” KOEL Gallery, Karachi (2016); “Liminal,” Khaas Art Gallery, Islamabad (2013); “Continuous / Present,” Rothas II, Lahore (2013); and “Letters From An Underground Vein Read,” KOEL Gallery, Karachi, (2012). She has also participated in Biennial Izimir (2011); the Bodrum Biennial (2013); and Mostra Internazionale di Pittura, Matera, Italy (2014). Her residences include “Recorded Time,” KOEL Gallery (2017); “Hic – 2” Workshop, Turgutreis / Bodrum, Turkey, (2013); Winter Academy, Fayoum, Egypt (2011); International Painting Symposium, Luxor, Egypt (2010) and Association Saint-Henri, France (1996).

Ayessha Quraishi writes of her photographic project for KB17: “I started photographing hoardings seven years ago. The scale of the metal grid and how it framed the sky fascinated me. I felt these empty frames mirrored the perspectives of individual lives that see a slice of the picture, not the entire panorama. Through the frames, I would often watch the grey Karachi sky change colour. Occasionally, I would spot kites glide through them, never knowing on which side of the structure the birds were until they became larger or smaller. Some disappeared. I felt that we too pass through life like birds traversing empty frames. Though the sky was often nondescript, I felt the empty frames offered me a space for reflection. Soon, the breathing space that allowed reverie was occupied and the sky in my eye shrunk. Due to the absence of a local government system, there was no regulator to oversee the mushrooming of billboards in the city. By 2015 Karachi had almost turned into a giant advertisement with every street littered with huge hoardings, many on structures so flawed they led to repeated loss of lives. On May 5^th 2016 the Supreme Court maintained that there was no law that permits installing outdoor advertising on billboards, hoardings and signboards on public property and ordered the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation, the Defence Housing Authority and all the cantonment boards to remove hoardings across the city by June 30^th 2016. They were taken down but left by the roadsides and empty plots. A year later they still lie there.”

Noorjehan Bilgrami

Born in 1950 in Hyderabad (India)
Lives and works in Karachi (Pakistan)

Noorjehan Bilgrami is a visual artist, textile designer, researcher and educationist. Her atelier, KOEL, pioneered the revival of hand-block printed, handloom and natural dyed fabrics in Pakistan. The KOEL Gallery, established in 2009, has provided a vibrant platform for emerging and established artists. Founder member of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, she was its first Executive Director, 1990–95, and former Chairperson, Board of Governors. Noorjehan’s publication, Sindh jo Ajrak, and film, Sun, Fire, River, Ajrak - Cloth from the Soil of Sindh, document the traditional textile. She authored Craft Traditions of Pakistan and Born of Fire, a profile of Pakistan’s renowned ceramist Salahuddin Mian; a documentary film, Yeh Kiya? and curated a Retrospective Exhibition on the artist at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. She was awarded the Japan Foundation Fellowship to pursue research on natural indigo in Japan and curated the exhibition ‘Tana Bana: The Woven Soul of Pakistan’ in collaboration with Jonathan Mark Kenoyer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the exhibition travelled to the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon; the Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, California and Mingeikan, the Japan Folk Craft Museum, Tokyo. She spearheaded “Pursukoon Karachi,” a concept for the revitalization of the city, working with a team of over 300 artists, designers and creative persons. Noorjehan’s vision is reflected in her art practice and over the years her work has been showcased by leading galleries around the world.

Noorjehan Bigrami writes of her installation for KB17: “My art practice is informed by four decades of apprenticeship with master craftsmen of Sindh. I have previously rendered, in book form and as documentary, the traditional art of ajrak making. This labour-intensive and mysterious process continues to inspire—and it serves as the basis for my current installation piece, Witness Creation Unfolding. Traditional ajrak making is a sacred knowledge, handed down through centuries within local family ateliers. The process begins with a tearing of the kora, or unbleached cotton, and in repeated rhythmic cycles this fabric is steamed, beaten on stone, washed and wrung out, spread under the desert sun—its lengths softening, made supple and ready to receive. At each successive stage of its development, the craftsman draws upon indigenous materials. And, both in its physical sense and in its philosophy, ajrak making mirrors the path of spiritual practice in Sindh. In its final impression, a jewel-like hue emits from the textile—a deep ruby and indigo—not imposed upon, but a part and substance of its very fibre. The bearing of this process forms the core of my installation. Matiari-based artisan, Muhammed Shafique, will develop the base materials, and I will work on them from within my resources as an artist, in my studio. The collaboration culminates as a spread of panels, each pair 13 feet in height, suspended across an open light-filtered space. The project serves as personal homage to a dying textile form. In the same gesture, we are witness to the mounting journey from emptiness or kora, towards essence.”

Guillaume Robert

Born in 1975 in Nantes (France)
Lives and works in Hotonnes (France)

Over the past fifteen years, Guillaume Robert has developed videographic, sculptural and photographic projects and has taken part in collaborative processes and research residencies. He is involved in the Bermuda project, which aims to build a collective art production center in Le Grand Genève. He has had numerous solo and group shows at various art centers and galleries throughout Europe. In 2016, his first monographic publication, Parages, was published by Edition Analogue and Galerie Françoise Besson (Lyon, France). His works are in various private and public collections, including the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain (France).

For KB17, Guillaume Robert has created a site-specific installation, UP TO THE BIG EYE, at the Alliance française de Karachi, from which he has also created a four-minute video work using drone footage with a bird’s eye perspective of the installation. He has also submitted a video called Drina as well as a series of drawings. Of his video and drawings, Robert writes: “Drina shows the reenactment of the building of a mini-hydroelectric station in Goražde (Bosnia). During the siege of the city that took place between 1992 and 1995, these improvised machines were attempts to open up the area — to be able to listen to the radio and gain access to the outside, to have a source of light and to be able to use medical equipment. A similar machine was re-made in Juso Velic's garage in June 2011. The micro-station was set afloat on the river, attached to the main bridge of the city over the Drina. Through this very concrete focal point (the reproduction of a micro-hydroelectric station), the process became one of relaying and documenting a heroic experience: the Goražde inhabitants' resistance to the siege that took place fifteen years before. I will also present ten drawings entitled Points of View. Each of them shows an Algerian watchtower. During and after the Algerian civil war, the military, public services and private companies built many of these lookout points around their infrastructures. I have discreetly photographed some of them and then drawn them as architectural projects or technical drawings.”

Mithu Sen

Born in 1971 in Burdwan (India)
Lives and works in New Delhi (India)

Mithu Sen completed her BFA (1995) and MFA (1997) from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, Visva Bharati, India and PG Programme from the Glasgow School of Art 2000-2001, UK. Her practice stems from a conceptual and interactive drawing background that has extended into video, sculpture, installation, poetry, sound and performance. Her journey critiques subtle hierarchical codes and hegemonies imposed on society, especially in those areas where humanity becomes a minority, whether sexual, political, regional, emotional or lingual. Swinging between distance and intimacy, Mithu makes the private public by engaging spectators into a game of active voyeurism. Her works not only open the barrier of intimacy to the public space but also highlight the increasing importance of interaction with the public as a part of the production of the artistic experience. Sen has participated and exhibited widely at museums, institutions, galleries and biennales, including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; TATE Modern, London; Queens Museum, New York; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India; MOMAT and Tenshin Memorial Museum of Art, Japan; Peabody Essex Museum, USA; S.M.A.K Museum, Gent; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; among others.

Shot on a beautiful morning following a storm in Bahia, Brazil, Icarus brings out tragedy in two-ways: first, in the tragic myth of Icarus, who died in a failed attempt to fly by gluing feathers to his arms, and, second, in the sorrowful death of the embryonic bird seen in the video. In this work on view at KB17, an army of ants gathers around a dead bird in an attempt to lift its lifeless body. In the process, the ants make the unformed wings move in a mock flap. As the horrific image merges with the beauty of nature’s life processes, it reveals the futility of dreams and the inevitability of death. In the context of these mythic allusions, the bird, a dreamer, becomes a martyr at the hands of fate and misfortune. 

Ayaz Jokhio

Born in 1978 in Mehrabpur (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Ayaz Jokhio obtained his BFA (with distinction) from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 2001. He dissects the grammar of images with a certain intellectual logic and uses for his artistic works an amalgamation of imagery from print media, the Internet, and popular culture along with his own observations of contemporary Pakistan. Jokhio uses installation, drawing, painting, and text to pose questions about the ways in which we regard and represent our world, often also commenting on the conventions of gallery display. His work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Pakistan and abroad, and he has been a resident artist in Switzerland, Germany and Japan. Ayaz Jokhio teaches at the Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University in Lahore.

Of his work for KB17 Ayaz Jokhio writes: “I never enjoy talking about or explaining my work. It is like explaining a joke, which makes no one laugh. This is the first time that I am trying to create an art piece with puppets. Puppetry has always been there in my heart, but always like a secret crush on someone. My installation for KB is an imitation of a common classroom setting in our public schools: students sitting in rows at their desks -- but replaced by marionettes/puppets. When someone opens the door and enters the classroom, all the puppets stand up like we all do during our student life in a classroom when a teacher or an elder enters. In my work, all the puppets are connected to the door through a mechanism of strings and pulleys. So basically when someone opens the door, it pulls the strings connected to the puppets and they all stand up. And when the door closes, the puppets all sit back down again. I have not followed the advice of many of my friends to make the puppets life-size, like real children. To me, they should be smaller than life so that they can look like puppets and not like real kids. Because the whole idea is to use puppets as a metaphor for what our educational system is trying to make out of our children.”

Mandarjazail Collective

Founded in 2015

The Mandarjazail Collective are Abdul Fateh Saif (b. 1990, Lahore), Fahad Naveed (b. 1990, Karachi), Shahzaib Arif Shaikh, (b. 1990, Hyderabad) and Veera Rustomji (b. 1992, Karachi). They are a group of visual artists hailing from a variety of creative disciplines, including: architecture; graphic design; textile design; photography; filmmaking; and fine art. Having been founded by a group of five like-minded creative individuals in 2015, the Collective now comprises twenty-three members, and continues to evolve with the addition of each new member. The Mandarjazail Collective represents a platform for symbiotic artistic relationships and dialogue, from which they provide one another with support, guidance and inspiration. They held their first show, ‘Excerpts’ at Koel Gallery, Karachi, in 2016, and are currently exploring various national and international opportunities.

 The Mandarjazail Collective’s work for the Karachi Biennale 2017, comprising of four large scale photographic portraits of the four members – Abdul Fateh Saif; Fahad Naveed; Shahzaib Arif Shaikh; and Veera Rustomji – is an artistic investigation into the powerful role that heavily-circulated images play in the formation of our essentialised perception of beauty and identity. The basis of the work’s subject matter is the ubiquitous fame of Steve McCurry’s image of the ‘Afghan Girl’, Sharbat Gula, which was published on the cover of National Geographic in its June 1985 edition. After the publication and mass-circulation of her piercing gaze, an image that is recognised throughout the world, Gula unwittingly became the symbol of the Afghan refugee crisis. The Mandarjazail Collective have placed themselves within this paradigmatic exemplar of the power of the media to utilise photographs to characterise and create a trajectory for an anonymous individual, questioning the ethical implications of witnessing sweeping narratives through the media’s prying lens. The scale of the works becomes a visual metaphor for the intense circulation of the media’s photographic currency, whilst the element of self-portraiture raises the almost existential concern with the fact that in global culture, one thirteen-year-old girl can be seen as representative for a whole population – for Sharbat Gula shall be known in posterity as the ‘Afghan Girl’.

Salman Jawed/Faiza Adamjee/Ali S. Husain/Mustafa Mehdi/Hina Fancy/Zaid Hameed

Live and work in Karachi

Salman Jawed is co-founder of Coalesce Design Studios, a house of multidisciplinary designers that go beyond form and function to interpret an intangible into a tangible built product. Faiza Adamjee is a concept writer and thinker. She focuses on big ideas, concepts and copywriting, along with graphic designing. Ali S. Husain is a Karachi based graphic designer. His style is illustrative, minimalistic, and edgy. He has recently launched a line of paper products, which aim to change the face of graphic design in Pakistan. Mustafa Mehdi is an architect by profession, who also practices graphic design, photography and product design. He is co-founder of Coalesce Design Studio. Hina Fancy is a textile designer, who works as a teacher and independent print designer. Famous for her unique style of experimental printing with natural dyes, she has exhibited her art in Pakistan and abroad. Zaid Hameed is a textile designer by profession, celebrating the indigenous crafts of Pakistan. He fuses traditional techniques and patterns with contemporary techniques and forms, helping to revive the dying art of ceramics in Sindh. They are a group of six independent designers, working together to redefine design, and the merging of the arts. From representing Pakistan at the Dubai Design Week 2016, to exhibiting their idea of Utopia at the London design Biennale, and putting up an installation at the Alchemy Festival in the Southbank Centre in 2017, the group is setting new standards internationally.

The artists write of their work for KB17: “Daalaan is an abstract playground where visitors are invited to revisit the utopian worlds they create as children. A place where anything is possible. A space without borders, where imagination has no bounds. Where people get together, and enjoy a playful moment in time... a setting where strangers become friends. The pieces evoke conversation. A setting that is incomplete without its participants, each one is designed to make people interact through play. The space is an open platform that is inviting to ideas and change. Feel the nostalgia, evoke the memories, and become a child. Leave all inhibitions behind. Rethink how you have changed, how you can change back, what was, what is, and what should be.”

Jamil Baloch

Born in 1972 in Noshki (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Jamil Baloch is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work narrates the impact of socio-political division in our societal structures. He obtained his BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 1997. His work has been shown in a number of solo exhibitions, at galleries including: Sanat Art Gallery, Karachi; Couadro Art Gallery, Dubai; ArtChowk Gallery, Karachi; Canvas Gallery, Karachi; Vermont Studio Center, USA; and Gandhara Art Space, Karachi. His work has been exhibited extensively in group shows, both nationally and internationally, in countries such as: USA; UK; UAE; France; China; Japan; Bahrain; Bangladesh; Sri Lanka; and Malaysia, as well as the Sea+ Triennale in Indonesia. He has also won several awards, including an Honourable Mention Prize at the 13^th Asian Art Biennale, Dhaka. He currently teaches at the National College of Arts, Lahore. His art practice draws from the world that surrounds him, aesthetically and conceptually, and this has entailed a multi-disciplinary approach, spanning sculpture, drawing, painting, new media and mixed-media installation.

Baloch’s sculptural installation for the Karachi Biennale 2017, Mega Project, revolves around the concentration of power within the elite, and how such an imbalance tramples those outside of this circle of society. Whilst the work can be read as a critique of the social structure of Pakistan, and the inspiration derives from the artist’s own region, Balochistan, it transcends specific categorisation as such. Rather, Mega Project denounces a pervasive, universal exploitation of human rights and the malefaction of those in positions of power and authority, denying the majority opportunities whilst projecting this duplicitous denial as for the people’s betterment, in order to maintain their own bloated status. This is perfectly captured by the visual allegory visible in Baloch’s sculptural installation; the anonymous, enwrapped bodies, with tyre tracks displacing their forms, symbolise the elite’s detached disregard for the downtrodden.

bankleer (Karin Kasböck & Christoph Maria Leitner)

Live and work in Berlin (Germany)

bankleer are Berlin-based artists Karin Kasböck and Christoph Maria Leitner. In their work, the duo develops installations and videos that address and expand documented performances and their settings. Using interventions and Happenings as a starting point they produce documentary-fictional videos, objects and spacial installations about distortions in society and about processes of transformation. A key component of bankleer's artistic practice is the interplay between documentary and fiction, social reality and artistic autonomy, art and non-art contexts. Recent shows and performances include Berliner Herbstsalon/Maxim Gorki Theater (2013, 2015, 2017), die Irrenden/Max-Joseph-Platz München (2016), into the city/Wiener Festwochen, compeung/Chiang Mai, Steirischer Herbst/Graz (2015) and transit/Bratislava (2014).

Of their work for KB17, The Thing, bankleer write: “In the city center around the Biennale, or nearby the exhibition building, we will place a meteorite - as it crosses the atmosphere, coming from the universe and reaching earth. Depending on the possibilities, the situation recreates an impact, with damage, a hole, or deformation. The meteorite is a sculpture that rests and becomes a performative element after some time. The sculpture is motionless and silent for quite a while, then slowly begins with sounds to speak to the audience, while body parts, such as arms or legs, become visible.”

Omer Wasim/Saira Sheikh

Omer Wasim (b. 1988, Karachi) has a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture and an MA in Critical Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore, USA. He has been teaching and practicing in Pakistan, since 2014, and is currently a faculty in the Liberal Arts Programme at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Saira Sheikh (1975, Karachi – 2017, Karachi) had a BFA from the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, Punjab, and an EdM from Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, USA. She had been teaching and practicing in Karachi, Pakistan, since 2013, and was Associate Professor and Head of the Liberal Arts Programme at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi. Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh are visual artists who practice together, and cast a retrospective glance at the present to radically examine and mine contemporary art practices, and recent, albeit superficial, interest of the global west in their region; and also to reconfigure, re-articulate, and disrupt existing and complacent modes of artistic engagement and production. Wasim continues to execute projects that were jointly conceived.

Wasim and Sheikh have written of their practice: “Given where we are situated in time and place, unnerved by our implicit and explicit experiences and collaborating with uncertainty and volatility, we attempt to understand the present by casting a retrospective glance; treating the present as past helps defy immediacy, allowing for conceptual and critical distance from contemporary realities, both corporeal and incorporeal, systems, and rhetoric. Our aim is to debunk and unpack (self-) colonising modes of knowledge construction and circulation by embracing contradictions as central to making and thinking—since any attempt to redact contradiction compromises possibility and criticality. Using a retrospective glance, we narrate through visuals, excavated in an unspecified future, from data buried and lost in digital and material archives in and around Karachi, to reorient the gaze toward the current epoch. Our projects include fictional and factual readings of collected and constructed images and objects; in order to witness, challenge, and disrupt unitary or binary readings of human ecologies, consumption, value, and labour. The data symbolises, enacts, and enables these contradictions, intensifying the very anxieties that it aims to subjugate, and in being isolated from its context becomes a relic of neoliberalism, hinting at modes—new and old—of constructing knowledge and histories. We, as artists, are not mere participatory observers, or witnesses, but are also responsible for generating, circulating, and perpetuating these hegemonic systems of constructing knowledge and histories. Recognising that it would be fallacious to assume otherwise, we acknowledge our complicity and agency, make them an integral part of our work, while simultaneously making ourselves accountable. Stemming from these frameworks, we investigate the global contemporary, the recent, albeit superficial, interest of the global west in this region, and art practices that pander to western as well as local ideas about living and making work in, from, and about Pakistan. We work together and in lieu of depoliticising or aestheticising politics, attempt to politicise aesthetics, and radically (“from Latin radix, radic-‘root’”) reconfigure, re-articulate, and disrupt existing and complacent modes of critical engagement and artistic production.”

Sheba Chhachhi

Born in 1958 in Harare (Ethiopia)
Lives and works in New Delhi (India)

Sheba Chhachhi studied at Delhi University, Chitrabani, Kolkatta and the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Installation Artist, activist, photographer and writer, she has exhibited widely in India and internationally including the Gwangju, Taipei, Moscow, Singapore and Havana biennales; her works are held in significant public and private collections including Tate Modern, UK, Kiran Nadar Museum, Delhi, BosePacia, New York, Singapore Art Museum, Devi Art Foundation, Delhi and National Gallery of Modern Art, India. Chhachhi has published writings, given talks and conducted workshops, research and projects relating to women, conflict, urban ecologies, visual culture and contemporary art practice in both institutional and non-formal contexts. She was Townsend Fellow at University of Berkley, 2005 and held the Mario Miranda Chair for Visual Arts at the University of Goa, India in 2015. Chhachhi was awarded the Signature Juror’s Prize for contemporary art in Asia by the Singapore Art Museum, 2011. In 2017, she was honoured with the Prix Thun for Art & Ethics, Switzerland.

Sheba Chhachhi’s lens based works investigate contemporary questions about gender, the body, the city, cultural memory and eco-philosophy, through intimate, sensorial encounters. Chhachhi began as an activist and photographer, documenting the women’s movement in India. By the 1990s, she moved to creating collaborative staged photographs, eventually turning to large multimedia installations. Her works retrieve marginal worlds: of women, mendicants, forgotten forms of labour, and often draw on pre-modern thought and visual histories to calibrate an enquiry into the contemporary moment. Chhachhi writes of her work on view at KB17: “Water has become a commodity. Today, we are beleaguered consumers trying to meet our needs in the midst of contamination and scarcity. The video reminds us of water as part of our symbolic, cultural, psychic life. Evoking pleasure, loss, and rejuvenation, the elephant, symbol of wisdom, power, fertility, becomes emblematic of cultural memory, of an eco-philosophy which has been submerged and must be recovered.”