Venues

The Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture Gallery (IVS)

IVS Gallery is a non-profit space that exhibits the work of both established and emerging artists. It is located in the right wing of the Nusserwanjee Building and is made up of two atriums that serve as a multi-purpose space to host a variety of exhibitions, book launches, and artistic events, as well as lecture series and other discursive projects. The gallery strives to achieve its educational purpose by serving as reference point for students by exposing them to the possibilities of traditional and contemporary art practices. The Karachi Biennale’s ‘Incidental Sculpture’ project also inhabits the campus of IVS, osmotically drawing attention to three-dimensional artwork, which, by nature of its incidental installation throughout the campus, interacts with the fabric of the site, simultaneously combining art and architecture in a symbiotic relationship.

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Participating Artists:

Ruby Chishti /
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Ruby Chishti

Born in 1963 in Jhang (Pakistan)
Lives and works in New York (USA)

Ruby Chishti is primarily a representational sculptor. Her work is largely autobiographical in nature. Ruby was formally educated at the National College of Art in Lahore, Pakistan. Over the past 17 years, she has produced a series of lyrical sculptures and installations that touch on such issues as Islamic myths, gender politics, migration, memory, universal themes of love, loss and of being human. Ruby’s early life was marked by pain and the recurring losses of loved ones. As a young woman, the experience of caring for her inert mother for over a decade deeply impacted Ruby’s psyche and practice – this internal experience found its echoes outside in the repressive political climate of Pakistan during the regime of General Zia ul Haq (1977-1988). Her work has been exhibited, among other places, at Taubman Museum, Queens Museum, Art Asia Miami, Arco Madrid (2010), Art Hong Kong (2008), India Art Fair (2013), The Armory Show NYC (2014), and the Asia Society, New York (2017). Her work can be found in the collections of the Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi, India; Harris Museum Preston, UK; V&A Museum of Childhood, London, UK; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK and elsewhere.

Ruby Chishti writes the following of her installation created for KB17: “Architecture bears witness to historical acts of domination, manmade atrocities and political violence. We Leave, We Never Leave, We Return Endlessly is an abstract form that appears to be a distorted world map as if drawn from memory, suspended from the ceiling. The overall form is a juxtaposition of architectural and human body structures, a witness of lives ripped and rebuilt, where I see links to personal and political narratives. It is a framework I use to explore the codependent relationship between personal experience and the socio-political narratives amplifying the voices of those who have survived emotional and physical trauma resulting from conflict, war and the universal subject of mortality. The work is an audiovisual installation created from unknown people’s clothing…I am interested in exploring the function of clothing that is beyond social status or sexual and cultural differences. It is my way of engaging with the persistence and tenuous fragility of human existence, while exploring materials and reinventing sculptural forms that can forge a sense of collective human connection.”

We Leave, We Never Leave, We Return Endlessly, 2017.
Recycled textile, wire mesh, thread, wood and archival glue.
210 x 330 x 35 cm.
Courtesy the artist

Jocelyn Lee /
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Jocelyn Lee

Born in 1962 in Naples (Italy)
Lives and works between New York and Maine (USA)

Jocelyn Lee received her BA in philosophy and visual arts from Yale University, and her MFA in photography from Hunter College. In 2013 she received a NYFA Fellowship, and in 2001 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Jocelyn Lee’s first monograph Nowhere But Here was published by Steidl Publishers in December 2010 with a forward by Sharon Olds. In 1996 her work The Youngest Parents was published by DoubleTake Books and The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in collaboration with Robert Coles and John Moses. Her works are in the collections of Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, France; The Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; The Yale Museum of Art, New Haven, CT; The List Center at MIT, Cambridge, MA; The Portland Museum of Art; Portland, ME; The Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO; The Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; The Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI; The Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, NC; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Bates College Museum of Art. Lewiston, ME; and The Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockport, ME; as well as numerous private collections. She is represented by Pace MacGill Gallery in New York and Flatlands Gallery in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Lee taught photography at Princeton University from 2003-2012 and at The Maine College of Art from 1993-2001. She has been a visiting artist at Yale University, Bowdoin College, Mass College of Art, and New York University.

Jocelyn Lee has submitted photographs from her series Last Light for KB17. The artist writes: “I’ve always used photography as a way to forcibly slow the events of my life. While my mother was dying of lung cancer, I compulsively made thousands of images with three kinds of cameras at every possible increment of time, from split-second to hour-long exposures. As long as my mother was still breathing, I felt the world urgently required my record. Using a medium-format camera, I photographed my mother, her home, our family and friends. With a primitive box camera, I made color pinhole photographs of the landscape around us: my mother’s garden, the view from her hospital room, the fields and yards of neighbors. In the low-light environment of the hospital, I used a digital camera. Together, these images are a meditation on love, the beauty of the physical world, and the transience of both. As my mother struggled to breathe, I made long exposures of the last foxglove, dogwood and delphinium to bloom during her life. I watched the heavy-headed peonies outside her bedroom window flower, ignorant of her pain, and then drop, petal by petal, day by day, to the ground. I took a pinhole photograph of white phlox blowing in the wind during the final hour of her life.”

Last Light, 2008.
(25 images made in the last month of your life with 3 kinds of cameras and exposures ranging from split seconds to 1 hour)
Archival pigment prints
Edition of 5 with 1 AP
Courtesy the artist

Ali Kazim /
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Ali Kazim

Born in 1979 in Pattoki (Pakistan)
Lives and works in Lahore (Pakistan)

Ali Kazim received his BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2002, and his MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2011. He has received a number of awards, including: Finalist for the Catlin Prize, UK; The Land Securities Studio Award, London; Young Painter Award, Lahore Arts Council; and the Melvill Nettleship Prize for Figure Composition, UCL, London. He has also participated in numerous art residencies, such as: The Art House Residency, Wakefield; Art OMI Artist Residency, New York; ROSL Travel Scholarship: Residency at Hospital Field, Scotland; Vasl Residency (Triangle Arts Trust), Karachi; and the International Artist Camp, George Kyet Foundation, Sri Lanka. His work has been exhibited extensively, both nationally and internationally, in group and solo shows, as well as in various collections around the world, including: the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena; the British Museum, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; the Burger Collection, Hong Kong; Creative Cities Collection, Beijing; the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; the Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; and the Samdani Foundation, Dhaka. He currently teaches in the Department of Fine Art at the National College of Arts, Lahore. The crux of Kazim’s multi-disciplinary artistic practice is the sensitive selection of materials in order to articulate the subject most efficaciously. This manifests itself in his work in the wide-range of media and technical practices that he utilises to investigate the multi-faceted, substructural elements of our everyday world.

In his untitled installation for the Karachi Biennale 2017, Kazim has used human hair to create a three-dimensional drawing in the space. The work derives from the artist’s interest in the complexity of the human body, both in its physiognomy and as a thematic concern. His selection of human hair as the material for his work reveals the basis of his artistic practice, which strives to utilise the most effective, yet often obscure material to depict his subject. In this case, he has used hair, by its nature an exterior feature of the human body, to represent the structure of the body’s interior world. By doing so, he has created a dialogue between the interior and exterior; whilst we can visibly perceive our hair growing, unable to consciously control its incremental growth without cutting it, we can very rarely perceive the constant internal function of our bodies. Thus, by using hair to represent the interior structure of our bodies, Kazim exteriorises the internal, just as the growth of our hair makes our constant bodily function visibly perceivable.

Untitled, 2011.
Hair, hairspray, invisible thread
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist

Nadia Kaabi-Linke /
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Nadia Kaabi-Linke

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

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

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

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

David Alesworth /
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David Alesworth

Born in 1957 in London (UK)
Lives and works between Lahore (Pakistan) and Bristol (UK)

David Alesworth is a Sculptor, photographer and researcher of garden history. Over the past decade his work has been predominately organized around ideas arising from the garden. However, this has been a very expanded ideation of the garden, more of the global forest of which we are all a part or as nature and culture than of the urban garden, but of course that too. He has visited the Botanical Garden as a concentration camp of exotic aliens, imprisoned in an act of cultural cleansing (Linz : 2007). The post-colonial garden in the video work “Joank” 2008, several public Botanical Interventions in Berlin, 2009-2010 and Botanical taxonomy in “The Garden of Babel” 2009. Also ideas of garden perfection in the textile works “Garden Palimpsest” 2010 and “Hyde Park, Kashan 1862” 2011, amongst others. He takes the garden as his key metaphor with which to probe humanity’s culturally specific relationships with the natural world and toward understanding nature more as a social problem. His own hybrid identity as a Pakistani National of White British ethnicity tends to inform most aspects of his current practice. Besides teaching in various Pakistani Art Schools and maintaining an active international art practice he has continued to work as a landscape designer and horticultural consultant in Pakistan for more than twenty-five years.

David Alesworth states of his “carpet intervention” on view at KB17: “A sense of place has been fundamental to my understanding of the world, the landscape and its living elements in particular. Over the last decade as an artist and researcher I've become more and more involved in issues of identity and post-coloniality. Lahore’s central city park known today as Bagh-e-Jinnah was formerly Lawrence Gardens and under the British Raj it was one of the numerous globe encircling Botanical gardens of Empire that were central to the British colonizing project. Initially intended as a garden of ‘acclimatization’ for English fruit trees and loosely based upon the design of Kew Gardens, Lawrence Gardens has continued to evolve through the intervening decades. The work is based upon a mapping of Lawrence Gardens from the 1970’s and the park and its broader environment are a veritable lab for the study of post-coloniality.”

Lawrence Gardens (Bagh-e-Jinnah), 2014 (Detail).
Hand embroidery in dyed sheep’s wool and other fibres into an antique Kashan carpet
366 cm x 305 cm.
Courtesy the collection of Dr Furqaan Ahmed

Sabine Bachem /
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Sabine Bachem

Born in Oldenburg (Germany)
Lives and works in Reasfeld (Germany)

Sabine Bachem is a German artist who grew up in Mexico and England. She attended the Michael Hall School in East Sussex, whose core focus is on arts and crafts. As Bachem recalls of those formative years, “This was the perfect place for me having had to learn three languages by the time I was seven and, therefore, finding language an unreliable source of communication, discovered art to be a very safe environment to reap and gather life’s secrets. From that time on, I have made art to understand. Through my work, I examine the structure of the human mind, which continually fascinates me. I search for images that on the one hand reflect the narrative, i.e. the translation of reality into a story, and on the other hand reflect the zone that appears when culture nudges up against nature. Both these states of human psychology create an art-ificial (in German‚ kunst-lich) reality. My media are painting and drawing.”

Sabine Bachem has submitted two drawings for KB17. She writes, “The portraits are images I have downloaded from social media sites that I have paired up with landscapes altered by culture in an attempt to create a narrative.”

 

Amruts, 2017.
Graphite, acrylic, charcoal on 230 gram paper
122 x 169 cm.
Courtesy the artist

Stephen Slappe /
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Stephen Slappe

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

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

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

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

Claudio Crescentini
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Claudio Crescentini

Born in 1961 in Rome (Italy)
Lives and works in Rome (Italy)

Claudio Crescentini is an art historian, critic and author of numerous essays and books. His primary interest is in the cultural changes of the 20th and 21st centuries in art languages and new media. He also has a keen interest in art in relation to urban planning and architecture. He has curated many international exhibitions, including “NOW: The Art Before the Future” (Contemporary Art Festival 2013-2014); Marisa and Mario Merz (2015), William Kentridge (2016), Pop Art in Rome (2017). He also curated, with Paolo De Grandis, the concept art project “From La Biennale di Venezia to MACRO: International Perspectives” (2016-2017). Since 2014, he has been a curator at MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma) and was a member of the public committee that selected Giuseppe Penone for the location of a large sculpture in the center of Rome (2017).

Claudio Crescentini writes of his project for KB17: “Three artists and a poet start from the ‘hybrid’ concept. Their view is now overturned. The three videos are not evidence of something that happens once, but the recording of what continuously happens in the artist’s brain: An uninterrupted and gratuitous flow of images. The natural and urban elements melt the specificities of the three works presented: Ironic ‘Nature’ – but not natural – by Candy Candy with a poetic concept by Patrizia Chianese; a wild ‘Urbanization’ vision by #MIH Made In Heaven; and ‘Emotion’ in motion by Laura Federici. Each artist is lost in reality, but their reality is a different thing from what you actually see.”

HYBRID SUITE / lost in reality
A project curated by Claudio Crescentini that includes:
Candy Candy / Patrizia Chianese, Natural Groove, 2016, video (sound, words, color), 1,20'', private collection (courtesy Roma Centro Mostre).
Laura Federici, Bolla, 2014, video projection (sound, color), 7,20'', collection of the artist. #MIH Made in Heaven, City Inside, 2016, video (sound, words, color), 10', private collection (courtesy Roma Centro Mostre).

3D Tour: