The Lari Octagon Green (LOG) was proposed in the wake of a quake in October 2015. It sought to address the emergency needs of the displaced by making use of readily available local materials for shelter. And the design also looks to local technique, so that the conical ... More
Founded in Los Angeles in 2011 by Arshia Haq and co-helmed by Jeremy Loudenback, Discostan is a space for performance, a record label, a radio show, and club all at once. It re-imagines through music the larger South and West Asia and North Africa region as a “fictional republic that ... More
Nabi & Rehman's collaborative project Mitti, Mazdoori, Mahaul is an ongoing dialogue with the ground and its realities in and around Lahore. It attends to materiality, memory, and practices to think about how soil counter-narrates the histories of improvement, and how the earth shapeshifts and resists demarcation — attaching and ... More
Nasir Bagh (Urdu: ناصر باغ) is a historical garden located on Lower Mall near Anarkali Bazaar in Lahore. Being surrounded by other historically significant landmarks of Lahore, such as Government College Lahore, Old Anarkali, and Urdu Bazaar, makes Nasir Bagh's location even more central and appealing. It is historically significant ... More
Stolon Press’s Hustle Culture is a record made of the daily life around three bird baths placed under a chaste tree and a tamarind tree, in a small garden, in a small town in Malaysia. The visitors to the baths vary—sunbirds, fantails, swallows, an occasional tailorbird, maybe even a kingfisher ... More
Nigar’s contribution to LB03 dives deep into the extractive practice of mining and its lasting impact on people and the environment. Into the Earth is a mixed-media installation that draws on the artist’s teenage experience working in the coal mines in his hometown. On the wall, a video immerses viewers ... More
The ceramic pieces on loan from the Furqaan Ahmed collection offer a glimpse into Salahuddin Mian’s prodigious output. They encompass the earlier round vessels and ghughu ghoray (reminiscent of clay horses toy from ancient Harappa), cookie or pickle jars and taller vessels with mouths and breast-like appendages, as well as ... More
In Thandi Sarak Eik Kahani (A story of Mall Road), Batool proposes a major public project that looks into the cultural histories and geographical structure of Mall Road. Located at the GPO square and Lahore High Court Square, this project attempts to reimagine and reclaim the city square that used ... More
For Phoenix, a newly commissioned work for LB03, Zheng Bo collaborated with seven Pakistani farmers living and working on a date palm farm outside Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to make a dance. The work celebrates the beauty of the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) and the skill of these stewards, highlighting ... More
Earth to Earth consists of two identical sets of unfired terracotta wares, installed symmetrically on either side of a window at Alhamra Art Gallery. Unfired, their materiality remains malleable, making them barometers responsive to changes in humidity, air pressure, and whatever air currents might carry their way. With one housed ... More
Spring Sailors – Six Synecologies Aloft responds to both experiences in the city by installing six sets of paper sculptures inspired by Lahori kite designs in the Aiwan or grand hall at the Shalimar Gardens. The kites’ geometry and arrangement harmonize with the Gardens’ precise symmetries, while their sails flutter ... More
Caste Brick grows out of Birender Yadav’s work with brick kiln workers and their families, an often exploited community on the Subcontinent. In spending time with the workers in the brickmaking industry in Mirzapur, Eastern Uttar Pradesh, the artist learned about a complex socio-economic system that brought together marginalized groups ... More
Wong Kit Yi worked with three local directors (Iram Sana, Aisha Suria, Saman Kamran) and three local actors to produce three video edits. The Bed She Made explores the relationship between fertility and social ecology in Pakistan and other parts of Asia that are already experiencing the direct effects of ... More
Womanifesto’s WeMend is an ongoing participatory workshop, begun in 2023 and realized in a dozen places so far, that invites visitors and community groups in different locations to engage in sewing, embroidery, and patchwork. In our fragmented times, WeMend explores the possibilities of convergence, offering time and space to slow ... More
Shelters for Seeds and All that Quietly Survives is an invitation to sit with other-than-human worlds and multispecies landscapes to allow and practice forms of ecological witnessing, inspired by the form and visual layout of the Southeast Asian mancala or congkak. The assemblage includes handmade paint from crushed aromatic incense ... More
Koreri Projection is a two-part installation comprising a mural-size painting and a ceiling projection that shines through bark and hanging banners onto found objects and the room itself. On entering the space, viewers are immediately confronted by the large canvas that makes clear the threats that neocolonial expansion and extractivism ... More
The title of the work Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous borrows from a verbal inflection that specifies time of action or state where ‘Tayem’ is future and ‘Ladhamba’ is continuous in the artist’s native language. Filmed in the Himalayas, the film follows a conversation between two indigenous figures from different historical ... More
Ancestral Structure, Deep Life is made of a sustainable textile created from pineapple leaves gathered in the Philippines, a process that extends the piña weaving tradition that dates back several centuries. The artist deems these creations “sessile beings,” which like trees are rooted in place. The life and structure of ... More
In Bamboo Tale: Stories of Encounters, Phaptawan Suwannakudt weaves together her life in Thailand and Australia, and ancestral and geological time. On the ground, a round mirror pane covered with charcoal invokes the Dyarubbin River, also known as the Hawkesbury, in New South Wales, which witnessed devastations of bushfires in ... More
Mai Kashi Ka Julaha (“I am a weaver of Kashi”) is a citation of the poet-saint Kabir created in textile by women weavers from waste materials, such as remaindered threads and fabric scraps, gathered from Varanasi's clothing industry. Varanasi (Banares), formerly known as Kashi, was the birthplace of the mystic ... More
The Fortress presents, then slowly takes apart, supposedly archetypal “Man,” the universal Enlightenment subject that justified Western colonialism, and continues to justify the exploitation of natural resources. As first encountered at Alfalah Theatre, the subject, as embodied by the character Wai King, rehearses and performatively constructs his position of superiority ... More
Museo Aero Solar is a project begun in 2007 that sounds the alarm about the proliferation of plastic bags by reclaiming them for community and art. In the case of Lahore Biennale 03, the professors, students, and staff from the Department of Fine Arts at Kinnaird College for Women worked ... More
With the belief ‘a garden for every creation,’ Bagh-e Noor Jahan aims to revitalize biodiversity in one of the city’s busiest and most polluted areas and is designed to increase the small-bird population in this historic and commercial thoroughfare. An aerial view of the constellation of community gardens reveals the ... More
How to Become a Rock, realized with Paulina Ruiz Carballido, Faheem Abbas and Mujeeb Ruzik, is a project emerging from ongoing engagement with the Karakoram mountains, where the Rizvi has spent part of the year since 2020. The initial approach to understanding the entanglements between human and geological bodies was ... More
Water Bodies, an ensemble of high-key blue and orange works made especially for Of Mountains and Seas, responds to the particular hydrology of Lahore, which generally schedules water delivery to residents only at certain times of day, making backup water tanks a necessary part of everyday life. Taking some of ... More
Since the late nineties, Qaiser has been dedicated to restoring the mangroves of Bundal and Khiprianwala Islands in Korangi Creek, Karachi. Mangroves are tropical trees that thrive in conditions most timber could never tolerate — salty coastal waters, and the interminable ebb and flow of the tide. With the ability ... More
Bauhinia Purpurea is a series of sculptures that Sopheap Pich began in 2022. Like the morning glory, a flowering weed that also helped nourish many Cambodians through the Khmer Rouge regime, and which Pich commemorated in a series of sculptures begun in 2011, the bauhinia purpurea is both pleasing to ... More
Daniel Otero Torres’s Speaking to the Ground is an installation of eight tall terracotta vessels, commissioned for the Lahore Biennale. It pays homage to the ancient irrigation system, known as ollas in the Americas and as matka on the Subcontinent. These unglazed clay pots, revered for their efficiency in irrigation, ... More
Metallurgical Practice: Landscape and Metallurgical Practice: Miners extends the artist’s investigation of Jos. Onto the images of its bare grasslands and portraits of local miners, Oghobase superimposes mining diagrams found in Rand Metallurgical Practice, two volumes of methodological diagrams published in 1912 in Johannesburg. Drawn by British colonial engineers and ... More
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain developed Intervals VI and Intervals III as part of a body of work in dialogue with the Dream Pool Essays (梦溪笔談), by Shen Kuo (沈括, 1031-1095). In his well-known text, the Song Dynasty thinker made what is no doubt the earliest published observations on climate change when ... More
New’s Mebuyan installations grow out of the native Mindanawon’s abiding interest in indigenous Filipino mythology, fantasy, and science, mixed with a dash of old-fashioned stagecraft. First realized for Burning Man and at Art in the Park in Makati, the Philippines, in 2021, each incarnation re-imagines Mebuyan, the Bagobo goddess of ... More
For LB03, Madhu continues his ongoing engagement with the River Ravi. Working on an individual and collective basis (with the Ravi Bachao Tehreek) over the last few years, the artist draws attention to the stresses and pollution suffered by the fragile body of water that over the centuries has defined ... More
The practice of Hong Kong-based Natalie Lo Lai Lai as artist is rooted in care for the local environment, responding to the relationships between humans and more-than-human beings that define the ever-changing agricultural cycle. This can be seen in A Messenger - Passerby in Our Battlefields, in which the many ... More
For “Of Mountains and Seas,” Khatri presents Return to Water, two from a series of paintings of Gharial crocodiles, a critically endangered species from South Asia, several of which are preserved as specimens at the Peabody Natural History Museum in New Haven, where the artist lives. In the museum, the ... More
Still Life is a life-size charcoal drawing on wasli paper of one of the region’s native inhabitants, the sea buckthorn shrub. The hardy plant is known for its medicinal properties and for the vital role it plays in preventing soil erosion, and offering shelter and sustenance to different species of ... More
Untitled (‘Ruins’ Series) is an ongoing series of works on paper inspired by long walks around unexcavated archeological sites in and around Lahore. Kazim meticulously reproduces each of them in Siyan Qalam, a form of Persian miniature painting, thereby connecting two crafts of clay and ink from different timelines. The ... More
The audiovisual installation Eye II (2015-2024) takes inspiration from the symbolism of the all-seeing eye across different cultures, including the seven-eyed prophet Zechariah from the New Testament and the Quran, as well as from Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction novel, The Word for World is Forest (1972). Motivated by protests ... More
For Blanket Talks - Series 2, a mixed-media installation and performance that continues from a project first realized in Bandung earlier this year, Mella Jaarsma created 8 different woodblock stamps, with designs based on satellite images of eight deforestation hotspots in Indonesia, ranging from mine sites to plantations and agriculture ... More
A member of the Hazara community, Jaan has spent eight years living without an identity card, despite being born and educated in Pakistan. In Shenakhti Card Nahi (not an ID card), Jaan questions the seemingly universal rights of citizenship by blurring the ID card beyond legibility. By replacing the ubiquitous ... More
Stains of Oxus takes viewers on a journey along the greatest Central Asian River, the Amu Darya – known from Greek times as the Oxus – from its birth in icy Tajikistan to its death in the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, now largely a desert. Along the way, the viewer ... More
In Memory Orbits, their site-specific installation for the Barracks Museum at Nasir Bagh, Ehsan ul Haq and Iqra Tanveer create a grotto-like experience that dilates to a universal sense of time. The installation provides five moments, each corresponding to one of the Barrack’s spaces, transitioning between objects, ceramic sculptures, and ... More
The Ascension is a 2018 performance in which the artist gilds an ice sculpture as it melts. The frozen statue is of the Buraq, a winged creature with the head of a woman and the body of a horse. While said to have been the mount of the Islamic Prophet ... More
Khorshid Fruit translates to mixed fruit in Persian, and represents the diverse crowd Hakeem has encountered after moving to Lahore, which makes her feel safe as a minority. In the painting, the artist created trees by collaging newspaper-cut texts with words like “hospitals”, “unsafe”, “Hazara”, “targeted”, “Quetta”, “Afghanistan” and “poor” ... More
Breathe: Lahore builds on the public art strategies of Dryden Goodwin’s Breathe, begun in 2012 as a campaign for clean air, in a city often rated as having the worst pollution in the world. At the heart of the project are thousands of minutely-realized sketches of different individuals, six to ... More
Lost Shadows is a video recording of a shadow puppetry performance that tells the story of an agrarian village irrevocably altered by the advent of industrial agriculture. Though the introduction of industrial hybrid crops in the 1980s freed traditional crop farmers from the seasonal famine (Monga), it came at a ... More
An extended fabric installation, Mesa Ritual. Chola Body Story is based on the artist’s own medical experiences. Taking as its point of departure the medical gauze that was ever-present during the artist’s experience with chemotherapy, the artist employs a reticular weaving technique similar to the openwork of indigenous gauzes, which ... More
The result of a three-year research project, China, Beijing, I Love You! is a collaboration between Köken Ergun and Indonesian animation artist Fetra Danu. “Invest in Indonesia / Make sure that you don’t miss it!” goes the refrain of a song featured in China, Beijing, I Love You! The film ... More
Taming Women and Waters in Soviet Central Asia looks at the Great Fergana Canal, a 270-km long waterway built in just 45 days in 1939 between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to divert water from the Syr Darya river to enable the industrial-scale production of cotton, the “white gold” of Central Asia. ... More
Chow and Lin’s Even If It Looks Like Grass opens up into co-existing systems of wheat and data centers, in a study that spans from the early human history 10,000 years till the present. It looks at global phenomena of agriculture and information technology structures that emerged and spread in ... More
Chong has been drawn to the presence of books, libraries, and writings in paintings. In Oleanders, the artist wandered around the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and captured one hundred six close-up images of paintings with books in them. The artist then turned these cropped images of books ... More
Promised Land is a three-channel interactive video game project that unfolds the narrative of the European history of colonialism by addressing the notion of land and landscape and how it is expropriated, exploited, and romanticized in both digital and material worlds. The work is a kind of film in which ... More
VASL is a collaboration between Alavi and Feroza Hakeem and Raheem Jaan, two Quetta-based Hazara artists. This collage series juxtaposes photographs of landscapes across Pakistan and Afghanistan with the Australian outback. As the curves of the mountains, rivers and landscapes of Pakistan and Afghanistan merge with those of the Australian ... More
In The Sound of Silence (#2), Alavi engages with the histories of Australia’s cameleers, laborers whose lives were intertwined with those of the animals they were hired to handle, and who immigrated from South and West Asia to help colonize the arid outback. Though they played a vital role in ... More
Feint Recollections of a Time Beyond is a digital render of a solitary Iraqi date palm tree, a national icon of Iraq, gently swaying in the waters of the Euphrates. After the ancient city Anah was flooded in 1987, many palm trees stood half-submerged, peering above the water line, a ... More
Nilofar Akmut’s “Plus-Minus One is Plus-Minus One Degree Celsius” emerges from thinking about climate change, printmaking, and embroidery, in collaboration with partners in London, Lahore, and Colombo, Sri Lanka. Fusing a non-linear performative narrative and experimental film, the artist references satellite images from the European Space Agency that shows the ... More
Nurjahan Akhlaq’s understated works on paper, referencing Japanese court imagery and modernist painters such as Francis Bacon, make use of the collage technique of making use of found and existing imagery materials. But the artist does collage one better. For Lasting Impressions, she used a blank but prepared sheet of ... More
Akhlaq is best known for his paintings and works on paintings, which drew on modernism and Mughal miniature painting in equal measure, and which laid the ground for an influential trajectory of contemporary practice by subsequent artists. His melding of tradition and innovation can also be seen in his lesser-known ... More
Agarwal’s I Am Going to the Sea, Clear the Path is a photographic and sound installation that spotlights the evolutionary history of endangered Indus and Ganges River dolphins, which reaches back over twenty-five million years, when the shallow Tethys Sea still covered the region, and before the collision of the ... More
KM-32, detailing the history of the artist’s mother’s decades-old food processor, lovingly pays homage to jugaad, a bricolage practice born of South Asian ingenuity and thrift that extends the life of everyday objects and stands in contrast to consumerist society's wasteful notions of obsolescence. The video highlights the skill of ... More
One of Pakistan’s earliest and most distinguished ceramic artists, Alam brought the world to Lahore through her exploration of different traditions of working with clay from across different parts of Asia and Europe. Among them was the deep history of the Indus Valley itself: Alam traced her own practice to ... More
Weaving footage from diverse hydrographies such as the Colorado, the Yaqui, the Xingu, the Spree, and the Magdalena Rivers, Carolina Caycedo’s To Stop Being a Threat and to Become a Promise (2017) contrasts the ancestral and rural 'campesino' lifestyle found throughout the Americas with extractivist approaches to water and land ... More
Abbas’s Aerial Studies are among the latest pieces the artist has realized in marble inlay, which she began to work with after her return to Lahore in 2015, engaging with local workshops and in the process developing a close familiarity with the stone’s variations across different parts of Pakistan and ... More