Waheeda Baloch

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

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

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