LB04

Open call for poets: Conference of the Stray Birds invites contributions from across Eurasia

Conference of the Stray Birds will present its inaugural collection of poems at Lahore Biennale 04: The Shape of Coexistence, taking place in spring 2027. The collection reflects on the legacies and possible afterlives of twentieth-century internationalism across Eurasia. Of particular importance to us are the internationalist writers’ conferences that took place across Soviet Central Eurasia in the post–World War II period. At these gatherings, writers and poets from different countries came together to share ... More

Programs

Urbanities – Art & Public Space in Pakistan

Urbanities aims to enable a broad audience to engage with contemporary art through discursive and artistic events, to link the emerging artist-curator generation in Pakistan with that in Germany, and to stimulate a lively exchange of discourse and practice.

Public Outreach

artSPEAK | Public Engagement through Art

The Lahore-based Awami Art Collective, a group of cultural practitioners, were invited to speak about their aim of bringing art to public spaces and why they considered such interventions to be of importance. Their ethos of celebrating diversity and enabling peaceful co-existence in a pluralist society particularly aligns them with the Lahore Biennale Foundation’s (LBF) own mission. The conversation covered the history of the collective as well as their recent projects and concerns, in order to reflect upon the context in which art can meaningfully engage with public space. The event was held at The Last Word on August 10, ... More

Publications

CORD OF DESIRES

CORD OF DESIRES by Miro Craemer was created during his two-months artist residency in Karachi, Pakistan, hosted by Vasl Artists' Collective, in the framework of Urbanities - art and public space in Pakistan.

Programs

Zero Waste Initiative

The Lahore Biennale Foundation (LBF) is committed to fostering sustainable practices through its Zero Waste Initiative, aimed at reducing the environmental footprint of our projects and daily operations. As part of this commitment, we have implemented a comprehensive waste management system that emphasizes recycling, repurposing, and responsible disposal methods.

Programs

Virtual Museum | Manduva: Exploring What We Won’t Like to Call ‘Lollywood’

Manduva is an exploration of seven and a half decades of Pakistani cinema. An attempt to initiate archiving and reading of indigenous cinematic syntax. Pakistan has loved and owned it sometimes but also hated and abandoned it intermittently. It’s part of Pakistan’s heritage and this component attempts to reclaim it, inspect, dissect and interpret. As part of this component of the Virtual Museum, LBF issued two Open Calls, for Filmmakers and Pakistani cinema enthusiasts, and young contributors were selected by the curator, Sarmad Khoosat– a leading filmmaker with international acclaim, to make mini-films reinterpreting Pakistani Cinema. These young filmmakers were ... More

Research

LBF – AAN Research Grant – 2018

Announced in Summer 2018, the LBF – Research Grant was intended for an individual or collective whose research focuses on movements and shifts in modern and contemporary art practice in Pakistan or its diaspora. Therefore, this call invited research proposals that address arts that arise from or are significant to Pakistan.

Publications

Gleaners Notebook

Gleaners Notebook, an A5 format notebook specially produced for LB03, takes as its point of departure the small-scale workshops that produce the bulk of exercise books for the city’s many students. The printers employ older paper ruling machines that use inked thread to line the sheets, and require some degree of manual labor. As part of the process, accidents or off-registered paper are generated during warm up and slow down. Made from these castoffs, the Gleaners Notebook emerges out of Yang’s longstanding practice of transforming school exercise books, diaries, and other such vernacular printed matter into artist publications. In doing ... More

Publications

Lahore Biennale Reader 02

Between Jan 26 and Feb 29, 2020, the Lahore Biennale 02 was exhibited at multiple sites across Lahore, Pakistan. Hoor Al Qasimi curated the work of over eighty artists and collectives under the theme of Between The Sun And The Moon, emphasizing participation from the Global South and with a stress on artists and works from Africa, Central Asia, West Asia and their diasporas. The multifaceted Biennale program included exhibited works, performances, participatory settings, publications ... More