Zeerak Ahmed (AKA Slowspin) (b.1990, Pakistan) is a mixed media installation/sound/performance artist now based in Karachi. In 2009, she formed a four-person collective, the ‘TBP’, and has been working and exhibiting with them since. After completing her Bachelors in Studio Art Hiram College, USA, she moved back to Karachi in 2012. She is now pursuing a Masters in Creative Practice at the Transart Institute in Berlin/NYC. For this exhibition, Zeerak has presented Aloud, 2019, for which she maps out sonic spaces that reside within the body. Channelling notes from the base, chest, throat, nose and head, she draws out her selves.
Komail Aijazuddin (b. 1984) is a visual artist and writer. He completed his BA degrees in Art & Art History at New York University, NY (2006) and his MFA from the Pratt Institute, NY (2010). His practice began as an investigation into what Islamic art might look like had it developed a figurative tradition. Using the Karbala narratives as a starting point, he drew comparisons with Catholic religious art. His practice has since expanded to include a larger vocabulary of religious art from various religious disciplines. He is interested in the intersecting notions of divinity, belief, blasphemy, the politicisation of religion, statehood and the question of what constitutes personal faith. He lives and works in New York City and Lahore. For Chapel of the Gilded Rage, 2020, he draws upon his experiences growing up in Lahore and pays homage to his memories.
Ali Baba (b. 1985, Pakistan) lives and works in Lahore. Ali Baba completed his BFA (2008) and MA (2012) from National College of Arts, Lahore. Trained as a painter but works in sculpture and installations. His main concern has been the human existence and its condition, equipped with sculptural techniques. In Erosion I, 2020, Baba examines the body and it's relationship to the architecture of the building. The piece examines the passage of time – it captures silent decay, not death, and the moment when these two forces collide with one another.
Affan Baghpati (b. 1991, Pakistan) lives and works in Karachi. Baghpati graduated with a BFA from Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi (2015) and an MA in Art and Design at SVAD, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore (2017). His practice revolves around collected, altered and fabricated objects. These discarded objects, once functional in regional Pakistani households, are either losing or have already lost their value, presence, and function. His objects aim to bring viewers closer to its intimate journey and respective material culture(s). An object of today is represented by objects from the past.
Sophia Balagamwala (b. 1987, Pakistan) lives and works in Karachi. Balagamwala received a BA from the University of Toronto (2010) and an MFA from Cornell University (2014). Balagamwala’s work lives in the space where history meets nonsense and fiction. Her practice explores myths of national heroes and histories, and how these histories become exaggerated, simplified and monumentalized. The subjects of her portraits, sometimes men sometimes beasts but always decorated and important, struggle with their identities and responsibilities. Stuck in colonial formats, they inhabit a gaudy and tragic space between their colonial past and their present.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto(b. 1990, Syria) is a visual artist, performer and curator. Bhutto is currently based in California where he received an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute (2016). His work explores complex histories of colonialism that are exacerbated by contemporary international politics and in the process unpacks the intersections of queerness and Islam through a multi-media practice. The works in this exhibition are part of a larger series, Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth, which is an investigation into histories of popular resistance, guerrilla warfare and anti-imperialism in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia that are then re-interpreted into an archive of an imagined revolution in a post-utopian and post-human world. In this series, Islam is used as vehicle to propel the futurist imagination, looking into its occult practices, mysticism and the evolution of its politicization.
Malcolm Hutcheson (UK) is a contemporary documentary artist, photographer and filmmaker who has been working in the field for 30 years. Interested in the evolution of photography, the intention behind Hutcheson’s work talks of the relationship between political ideology and a referential system of aesthetics. Hutcheson's work talks of this relationship with the intention of rediscovering the political work within cultural activity. The five photographs in this exhibition were taken in 2010 and show members of the transgender community, in Lahore, in film poses taken against theatre backdrops. The photographs have been taken with Ruh Khitch camera, made in Lahore and formerly used by a street photographer who worked outside Shalimar Gardens.
Amra Khan (b. 1984, Pakistan) is an Inter disciplinary visual artist & educationist, based in Lahore. Graduated from National College of Arts, Lahore with a distinction in painting in 2008. Has a Masters degree in Visual arts from NCA and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) Paris, France, from 2010- 2011. She is skilled in oils, acrylics & miniature painting & often expresses her talents through human hair sculptures & video installations. Her work tends to revolve around having two poles, different ideas and personalities living in the same body, conflicting gender, religion, the male power and identity. For The Red Room, 2020, Khan has created a private boudoir, highlighting the enforcement of gender roles within society.
Saba Khan (b.1982, Pakistan) lives and works in Lahore. Khan completed her BFA from National College of Arts, Lahore (2005) and MFA from Boston University, Boston (2010). Khan’s work is pumped with humour and satire; it looks at the class divides through layers of local aesthetics. The works also make caustic commentary on political and social conditions with inside-jokes and symbols while not preaching on a particular stance. Moti Sagar’s House and Trees, 2011 is a collection of photographs Khan took of Mr. Sagar’s home. The house was flamboyant and highly decorated, the garden was lush with trees and vegetation. The house was demolished a few years ago and the fig tree was cut up and sold, leaving no trace of Moti Sagar.
Hira Nabi (b. 1987, Pakistan) is a filmmaker and a multimedia artist. She holds a BA in video and postcolonial studies from Hampshire College (2010), and an MA in cinema and media studies from The New School (2016). Her practice moves across research and visual production interrogating the relationship between memory and histories, witnessing and testimonies through image and narrative. Single Screen Shaadi, 2018, is an image from the day of Mubarak Cinema’s transformation, from a historic cinema to a wedding venue. A permanent marquee was being constructed inside the lower hall of the theatre to be a wedding tent under which new roles could be enacted, and new performances witnessed, and entertainment sought.
Seema Nusrat (b. 1980, Pakistan) is a visual artist based in Karachi, Pakistan. Having obtained a BFA from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in 2002. She went on to pursue a Masters in Fine and Media Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, Canada. Nusrat’s work transpires from the energy found in the urban metropolis and her sculptures, drawings and collages indicate her capacity to understand the most unusual materials, which are incorporated in her oeuvre. Seema has exhibited her work within Pakistan and internationally. In Future Facades, 2020 Nusrat highlights the feeling of a growing lack of control over the environment and surroundings that we live in. This insecurity has manifested into security infrastructure of several forms, sizes and colours, which has become omnipresent in public spaces and institutions of importance, creating a new language.
Abdullah Qureshi (b. 1987, Pakistan) is a Pakistani born artist, educator, and cultural producer. Within his practice, he is interested in using painting and collaborative methodologies to address personal histories, traumatic pasts, and childhood memories. Through his on-going doctoral project, entitled Mythological Migrations: Imagining Queer Muslim Utopias, he examines formations of queer identity and resistance in Muslim migratory contexts. Qureshi's work has been exhibited widely locally and internationally. He is currently a Doctoral Candidate, supported by Kone Foundation, at Aalto University in Finland. Qureshi’s film, Journey to the CharBagh, 2019 written and directed by the artist, produced by Danai Anagnostou, with Directors of Photography Hadi Rehman and Kerttu Hakkarainen draws upon Sufi traditions of interpreting Islamic sacred texts, where love and equality are celebrated. The narrative focuses on the figure of the Buraq, a winged mythological creature with the ability to travel to heaven, encountering terrestrial and celestial beings, moving toward a spiritual and queer awakening.
Aroosa Rana (b. 1981, Pakistan) is a visual artist and educator. She received a BFA from National College of Art (2003) and an MA in art education from Beaconhouse National University (2017). Her work explores the act of viewing. For View Within, 2020, Rana’s creation blurs the lines between the subject and the spectator. The rapidly diminishing difference between reality and its reflection is the main motif — and motive — of the work. Created with coats of images it investigates the perception and presence of known reality. The work provides a passage to approach or access the optical world through multiple interfaces. These mediate between physical presence and its representation: two entities that in our times have blended to such an extent that it is difficult to distinguish the subject and the spectator
Sahyr Sayed (b. 1986, Pakistan) a visual artist based in Lahore, she graduated from the National College of Arts in 2012. Trained as a miniature painter; Sayed constructs her dollhouse inspired, pieces to explore the idea of home. She has exhibited regularly in Pakistan and India. For Fashioned Nostalgia, 2020, Sayed continues her exploration of the idea of home, focusing on Lahore and the construction within the city of the imagined, ideal domestic space and the place of a woman within it.
Mohsin Shafi (b. 1982, Pakistan) is an independent interdisciplinary artist living and working in Lahore - Pakistan, who is proactive about carving space, self-representation and self-empowerment using art and activism. Shafi’s practice focuses on the interconnectivity of tradition, modernity, culture, religion, gender, sexuality and on the ability of these forces to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination. In last one decade, He has showcased his work at all prominent galleries in Pakistan, as well has exhibited internationally at various art fairs, traveling shows, galleries and alternative venues. For Okhay Lafzān da’i māe’nay (Difficult are the meanings of words), 2020, Mohsin has presented a film which questions the blurred edges between identity and the intentions of identity. He attempts to capture what he sees and record their frail existence, only to return and relive.
Masooma Syed (b. 1971, Pakistan) identifies as an artist and art academic. She has lived and worked throughout South Asia. Syed’s art practice involves intricate processes, layered ideas of duality, reality and fiction in nation theories/culture propaganda and history as battleground. Diverse mediums are also accounts of her own life as a woman in historically, socially and politically conflicted space and times of conflicted borders, contested bodies, migrations and chaos. For this exhibition, Syed has created a fictional theatrical response to the imagined actress of Sagar Theatre and different time zones. Fantasy, fiction and fallacy is all mixed up ironically in the cultural and identity shifts in history and stage.
Komail Aijazuddin (b. 1984) is a visual artist and writer. He completed his BA degrees in Art & Art History at New York University, NY (2006) and his MFA from the Pratt Institute, NY (2010). His practice began as an investigation into what Islamic art might look like had it developed a figurative tradition. Using the Karbala narratives as a starting point, he drew comparisons with Catholic religious art. His practice has since expanded to include a larger vocabulary of religious art from various religious disciplines. He is interested in the intersecting notions of divinity, belief, blasphemy, the politicisation of religion, statehood and the question of what constitutes personal faith. He lives and works in New York City and Lahore. For Chapel of the Gilded Rage, 2020, he draws upon his experiences growing up in Lahore and pays homage to his memories.
Ali Baba (b. 1985, Pakistan) lives and works in Lahore. Ali Baba completed his BFA (2008) and MA (2012) from National College of Arts, Lahore. Trained as a painter but works in sculpture and installations. His main concern has been the human existence and its condition, equipped with sculptural techniques. In Erosion I, 2020, Baba examines the body and it's relationship to the architecture of the building. The piece examines the passage of time – it captures silent decay, not death, and the moment when these two forces collide with one another.
Affan Baghpati (b. 1991, Pakistan) lives and works in Karachi. Baghpati graduated with a BFA from Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi (2015) and an MA in Art and Design at SVAD, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore (2017). His practice revolves around collected, altered and fabricated objects. These discarded objects, once functional in regional Pakistani households, are either losing or have already lost their value, presence, and function. His objects aim to bring viewers closer to its intimate journey and respective material culture(s). An object of today is represented by objects from the past.
Sophia Balagamwala (b. 1987, Pakistan) lives and works in Karachi. Balagamwala received a BA from the University of Toronto (2010) and an MFA from Cornell University (2014). Balagamwala’s work lives in the space where history meets nonsense and fiction. Her practice explores myths of national heroes and histories, and how these histories become exaggerated, simplified and monumentalized. The subjects of her portraits, sometimes men sometimes beasts but always decorated and important, struggle with their identities and responsibilities. Stuck in colonial formats, they inhabit a gaudy and tragic space between their colonial past and their present.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto(b. 1990, Syria) is a visual artist, performer and curator. Bhutto is currently based in California where he received an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute (2016). His work explores complex histories of colonialism that are exacerbated by contemporary international politics and in the process unpacks the intersections of queerness and Islam through a multi-media practice. The works in this exhibition are part of a larger series, Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth, which is an investigation into histories of popular resistance, guerrilla warfare and anti-imperialism in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia that are then re-interpreted into an archive of an imagined revolution in a post-utopian and post-human world. In this series, Islam is used as vehicle to propel the futurist imagination, looking into its occult practices, mysticism and the evolution of its politicization.
Malcolm Hutcheson (UK) is a contemporary documentary artist, photographer and filmmaker who has been working in the field for 30 years. Interested in the evolution of photography, the intention behind Hutcheson’s work talks of the relationship between political ideology and a referential system of aesthetics. Hutcheson's work talks of this relationship with the intention of rediscovering the political work within cultural activity. The five photographs in this exhibition were taken in 2010 and show members of the transgender community, in Lahore, in film poses taken against theatre backdrops. The photographs have been taken with Ruh Khitch camera, made in Lahore and formerly used by a street photographer who worked outside Shalimar Gardens.
Amra Khan (b. 1984, Pakistan) is an Inter disciplinary visual artist & educationist, based in Lahore. Graduated from National College of Arts, Lahore with a distinction in painting in 2008. Has a Masters degree in Visual arts from NCA and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) Paris, France, from 2010- 2011. She is skilled in oils, acrylics & miniature painting & often expresses her talents through human hair sculptures & video installations. Her work tends to revolve around having two poles, different ideas and personalities living in the same body, conflicting gender, religion, the male power and identity. For The Red Room, 2020, Khan has created a private boudoir, highlighting the enforcement of gender roles within society.
Saba Khan (b.1982, Pakistan) lives and works in Lahore. Khan completed her BFA from National College of Arts, Lahore (2005) and MFA from Boston University, Boston (2010). Khan’s work is pumped with humour and satire; it looks at the class divides through layers of local aesthetics. The works also make caustic commentary on political and social conditions with inside-jokes and symbols while not preaching on a particular stance. Moti Sagar’s House and Trees, 2011 is a collection of photographs Khan took of Mr. Sagar’s home. The house was flamboyant and highly decorated, the garden was lush with trees and vegetation. The house was demolished a few years ago and the fig tree was cut up and sold, leaving no trace of Moti Sagar.
Hira Nabi (b. 1987, Pakistan) is a filmmaker and a multimedia artist. She holds a BA in video and postcolonial studies from Hampshire College (2010), and an MA in cinema and media studies from The New School (2016). Her practice moves across research and visual production interrogating the relationship between memory and histories, witnessing and testimonies through image and narrative. Single Screen Shaadi, 2018, is an image from the day of Mubarak Cinema’s transformation, from a historic cinema to a wedding venue. A permanent marquee was being constructed inside the lower hall of the theatre to be a wedding tent under which new roles could be enacted, and new performances witnessed, and entertainment sought.
Seema Nusrat (b. 1980, Pakistan) is a visual artist based in Karachi, Pakistan. Having obtained a BFA from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in 2002. She went on to pursue a Masters in Fine and Media Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, Canada. Nusrat’s work transpires from the energy found in the urban metropolis and her sculptures, drawings and collages indicate her capacity to understand the most unusual materials, which are incorporated in her oeuvre. Seema has exhibited her work within Pakistan and internationally. In Future Facades, 2020 Nusrat highlights the feeling of a growing lack of control over the environment and surroundings that we live in. This insecurity has manifested into security infrastructure of several forms, sizes and colours, which has become omnipresent in public spaces and institutions of importance, creating a new language.
Abdullah Qureshi (b. 1987, Pakistan) is a Pakistani born artist, educator, and cultural producer. Within his practice, he is interested in using painting and collaborative methodologies to address personal histories, traumatic pasts, and childhood memories. Through his on-going doctoral project, entitled Mythological Migrations: Imagining Queer Muslim Utopias, he examines formations of queer identity and resistance in Muslim migratory contexts. Qureshi's work has been exhibited widely locally and internationally. He is currently a Doctoral Candidate, supported by Kone Foundation, at Aalto University in Finland. Qureshi’s film, Journey to the CharBagh, 2019 written and directed by the artist, produced by Danai Anagnostou, with Directors of Photography Hadi Rehman and Kerttu Hakkarainen draws upon Sufi traditions of interpreting Islamic sacred texts, where love and equality are celebrated. The narrative focuses on the figure of the Buraq, a winged mythological creature with the ability to travel to heaven, encountering terrestrial and celestial beings, moving toward a spiritual and queer awakening.
Aroosa Rana (b. 1981, Pakistan) is a visual artist and educator. She received a BFA from National College of Art (2003) and an MA in art education from Beaconhouse National University (2017). Her work explores the act of viewing. For View Within, 2020, Rana’s creation blurs the lines between the subject and the spectator. The rapidly diminishing difference between reality and its reflection is the main motif — and motive — of the work. Created with coats of images it investigates the perception and presence of known reality. The work provides a passage to approach or access the optical world through multiple interfaces. These mediate between physical presence and its representation: two entities that in our times have blended to such an extent that it is difficult to distinguish the subject and the spectator
Sahyr Sayed (b. 1986, Pakistan) a visual artist based in Lahore, she graduated from the National College of Arts in 2012. Trained as a miniature painter; Sayed constructs her dollhouse inspired, pieces to explore the idea of home. She has exhibited regularly in Pakistan and India. For Fashioned Nostalgia, 2020, Sayed continues her exploration of the idea of home, focusing on Lahore and the construction within the city of the imagined, ideal domestic space and the place of a woman within it.
Mohsin Shafi (b. 1982, Pakistan) is an independent interdisciplinary artist living and working in Lahore - Pakistan, who is proactive about carving space, self-representation and self-empowerment using art and activism. Shafi’s practice focuses on the interconnectivity of tradition, modernity, culture, religion, gender, sexuality and on the ability of these forces to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination. In last one decade, He has showcased his work at all prominent galleries in Pakistan, as well has exhibited internationally at various art fairs, traveling shows, galleries and alternative venues. For Okhay Lafzān da’i māe’nay (Difficult are the meanings of words), 2020, Mohsin has presented a film which questions the blurred edges between identity and the intentions of identity. He attempts to capture what he sees and record their frail existence, only to return and relive.
Masooma Syed (b. 1971, Pakistan) identifies as an artist and art academic. She has lived and worked throughout South Asia. Syed’s art practice involves intricate processes, layered ideas of duality, reality and fiction in nation theories/culture propaganda and history as battleground. Diverse mediums are also accounts of her own life as a woman in historically, socially and politically conflicted space and times of conflicted borders, contested bodies, migrations and chaos. For this exhibition, Syed has created a fictional theatrical response to the imagined actress of Sagar Theatre and different time zones. Fantasy, fiction and fallacy is all mixed up ironically in the cultural and identity shifts in history and stage.