Dream-like, yet grittily immersed in the everyday struggles of life in war-ravaged Afghanistan, video artist Lida Abdul’s vivid installations capture human agency amidst precarity and suffering. Children undertake reconstruction amidst ruin in 'Brick Sellers of Kabul'. Locals stage a protest to the Taliban’s destruction of pre-Islamic heritage in 'Clapping with ... More
Hoda Afshar’s Remain was made in collaboration with several men in detention for six or more years after they left their homelands to seek asylum in Australia. Comprising still and moving images, voice recordings and text, the men bear witness to the dreams, violent realities, boredom and beauty of life ... More
The late Madiha Aijaz used photography, film and fiction to explore spaces and communities at the periphery of contemporary civic life. Her interest in remembrance and orality led her to explore the enigmatic significance of traditional folk songs. Works exhibited in LB02 include Vagdi Juke Box and Veer Ras, a ... More
Ajam Media Collective’s Naskh va Taaliq is a 10-day workshop bringing together artists and scholars from Iran and Pakistan to explore the artistic and intellectual threads that bind them. The workshop includes ethnographic research at Sufi shrines in Lahore and public events focusing on shared forms of art and culture- ... More
Pioneer of the Black Audio Film Collective, John Akomfrah’s groundbreaking multimedia installations comprise layers and juxtapositions of documentary with diverse forms of visual and sonic expression to overwhelming sensory effect. LB02 features some of the Ghanaian British artist earliest works, Expeditions 1: Signs of Empire and Expeditions 2: Images of ... More
“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. I paint on newspaper. My works is on vision. What we see and what we think are different. Sometimes we reject things we. Our mind does not follow our eyes each and every time. My painting is based on ... More
“The influence heralded by historic trade with South Asian countries, as well as reliance on foreign labour during the modernisation of the Persian Gulf until the present day, has breeded physical, economic, and social hybrids that have shaped cultural outcomes. My practice has been utilising fiction, food, and magical realism ... More
Renowned for her sumptuous image-making about contemporary social life in the United Arab Emirates, Farah Al Qasimi’s debut short film embarks upon a provocative exploration of gender, place and the body. Um Al Naar is made in the style of a fictional reality television channel. It features an interview with ... More
Photography and video, language and sound are vehicles to explore the nature of experience, and probe the limits of representation in the art of Basma Al Sharif. We Began By Measuring Distance splices long still frames of life in Gaza with images of nature, and fragments of an account in ... More
'On my research trip to Lahore, I learned about the story of Anarkali. According to legend, Anarkali had an affair with the crown prince against the wishes of Mughal Emperor Akbar, who ordered her be buried alive between walls. Today the Tomb of Anarkali, which was built over the site ... More
“As a child, home was the place where I was born: Quetta, Pakistan. I remember, the sky was clear and blue for days. The nights full of stars. One day I suddenly encountered some people in the streets of my city, who I knew had come from elsewhere. Across the ... More
“Carved in stone and seemingly discovered in a riverbed, embedded artifacts and traces collapse time between ancient era and the present. As an artist I always have remained interested in collecting objects and especially those which have connection with past. My work is about revisiting and preserving the old, and ... More
Poignant socio-political critique, symbolism and humour combine in the art of Halil Altindere: multimedia installations, performances and collaborations with ballet dancers, opera singers, hip hop artists, police officers and architects foreground the agency of people and subcultures as modes of resistance against oppressive systems. LB02 features Homeland, Space Refugee and ... More
Karachi born, London-based conceptual artist Rasheed Araeen is a key figure in contemporary art. His work as a sculptor, writer and activist consists of pioneering contributions to minimalism and seminal interventions in post-colonial theory that have profoundly reshaped the landscape of post-war British art. Works featured in LB02 include Black ... More
Marwa Arsanios’s 'Who is afraid of ideology? Part II' looks at ecofeminist groups in northern Syria. One such outfit is the Autonomous Women’s Movement in Rojava, whose care of the land and each other reveals a community in which women, nature and animals are imbricated within an alternative economy. Problematizing ... More
“Someone told me about the existence of hijras in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. During a trip to India in 2009, I was introduced to a group of them and their guru. They see themselves neither as men nor women, even if they look like transgenders, but as women living in a ... More
From migration to botany, earthquakes and prawn-peeling factory workers, the art of Yto Barrada addresses a vast array of issues and themes using diverse practices and disciplines. Amidst the sprawling scope of her remarkable corpus, recurrent themes include colonialism, past and present; urban architecture; history and memory; power and strategies ... More
An octagonal pool referencing Persia’s ancient water management is split in two, evoking uncertainty, division and ecological crisis. Bahar Behbahani’s sculptural intervention on a ruined model of the Ravi River transforms the grounds of the Punjab Government’s Water Irrigation Department into a zone of critical questioning. Heritage, local knowledge and ... More
The gait of daily life, the pull of a desert wind, the beat of a folk hymn encounter one another in the work of Syrlybek Bekbotayev, whose multimedia practice wrestles with questions of political positionality, generational treason and cultural provenance. By turning footnotes of Kazakh art history into machinery, salty ... More
Shot on location in abandoned palaces, colonial offices and the Mumbai harbour, British artist Zarina Bhimji’s Yellow Patch (2011) is a densely evocative meditation on the significance of architectural ruin. Decay and dilapidation are poetically surveyed amidst deserted land and seascapes. A layered history of the Indian Ocean trade reveals ... More
Investigating Lahore’s Sikh heritage through research and recuperation of its traces in culture and architectural space, Infinite Nectar reflects on history, memory, and the politics of (in)visibility over time in urban contexts. A dialogic exchange between Hera Büyüktaşçıyan and Hajra Haider Karrar, the project consists of a video installation and ... More
“This semi fictional narration is the story of a young family moving into their first house in 1985, a modest but new housing society by the sea in Karachi. Beyond the cul-de-sac, a grid of empty roads around sunken rectangles of dirt stretch for eternity into the sea. This is ... More
Shezad Dawood’s Encroachments is a meditation on sovereignty and space in Pakistan’s early decades. The artist reflects on parallel readings of space and architecture through a virtual reality environment of Richard Neutra’s 1959 US Embassy (later Consulate) in Karachi, and Ferozsons bookshop on Mall Road in Lahore. The work explores ... More
Bodies, vehicles, times, places are juxtaposed and inter-spliced in unexpected encounters that enchant, seduce and unsettle. Berlin-based multimedia artist Haris Epiminonda’s work consists of video installations and collages that forge new, non-linear dimensions and experiences from extant materials, old and new technologies. Familiar music and melodies turn photographs into eerie ... More
Recuperating history amidst transience in Dubai’s oldest neighbourhoods, photographer and filmmaker Reem Falaknaz documents changing relationships between people, objects, and place. Her newly commissioned installation and publication for LB02 illuminates a little-known cultural link between Pakistan and the UAE: the popular leisure pursuit of pigeon racing. The work features characteristic ... More
Alia Farid’s research-based practice investigates humanity’s multidimensional relationship with built and natural environments, especially in her dual homelands of Latin Amercia and the Gulf. In a newly commissioned film for LB02, Farid turns her attention to the alluvial plains of Pakistani Punjab, where the ties that bind locals to the ... More
“A chariot without a conductor takes to the road. Where is it going and how? I want to show what it is to look at an enigma. I want every viewer to think for himself, about what we know and what we don’t know. I want to show something that ... More
Jeanno Gaussi’s Peraan-e-Tombaan [Pant and Shirt] is a performance-based video installation in which a group of dancers appear to be dressed in traditional Afghan men’s clothing. Upon closer examination, the costumes are in fact stitched from fabric used for military and police uniforms. Past is thus juxtaposed with militarised present ... More
Mariam Ghani’s 'What We Left Unfinished' tells the incredible and mostly true story of five unfinished feature films from the Communist era in Afghanistan (1978-1991) - when films were weapons, filmmakers became targets, and the dreams of constantly shifting political regimes merged with the stories told onscreen. It is also ... More
Women on Aeroplanes is an international project curated by Annett Busch, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet and Magda Lipska in collaboration with the Otolith Collective. It documents the largely unrecognised role of women in struggles for liberation, their participation in transatlantic networks, and their voices in the revolutionary socio-political movements of post-colonial societies. ... More
A child of the Pop Art generation, the concepts Hassan Hajjaj employs are seductively witty and playful while having a serious edge. Inspired by traditional front-room living spaces where visitors are received in Moroccan homes, offered tea, food and welcomed to stay, Le Salon invites us to a familiar, domestic ... More
William Blake’s exploration of spirituality through the sublime power of poetry resonated with Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq’s interest in spirit possession practices by Sudanese women known as Zar. This unlikely convergence lead to the development of themes and styles that run throughout her oeuvre: distorted faces and figures of women rendered ... More
Amar Kanwar has made over forty films about a range of issues from politics and economics to philosophy and art. Melding documentary and transcendental rumination to forge a distinct mode of visual essay, A Season Outside is a subtle and poetic work written and narrated by the artist. Soulful, nondidactic ... More
Accomplished painter and compelling storyteller whose works are said to have profoundly (re)animated our ideas of identity, beauty and spiritual devotion: Ali Kazim’s atmospheric renderings of earthy landscapes and parched terrain are imbued with a dream-like quality and awareness of ancient civilization. Close observers of his portraiture will detect poignant ... More
A cinematic montage recalls the decade from1962, when Algiers became a Mecca for revolutionaries from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili’s Foreign Office features young Algerians reflecting on the ghostly resonance of this tumultuous past. The resulting dialogue sheds light on the potential of historical struggles and ... More
Intensive research and cartography inform Naiza Khan’s mixed media practice, which explores uneven geographies of the South from multiple disciplines. Gathered over a decade from a peninsula off the coast of Karachi, 'Manora Field Notes' bears witness to the slow erasure of an Island’s architectural history and natural ecology. Hand-cast ... More
Imran Ahmad Khan’s work explores how individual and collective life is cultivated through artifacts such as figurines, food systems, and other material human creations, from across history into the present. He is especially interested in how the juxtaposition of materials and forms catalyse new imaginations that draw from the past ... More
Saba Khan's multimedia work moves within the language of memorial, monument and public art. From lush beaded paintings of cakes to miniature dioramas of a bureaucrat's boring office; from flashing LED signs of stereotyped "Islamic art" to embellished textile banners honoring the mundane generator, she balances grandeur, artifice and satire ... More
Lahore-based graduate of the National College of Arts Farkhanda Ashraf Khilji is a painter and video artist. Her work examines basic ideas and actions from quotidian life that are rarely accorded importance, but which play a vital role in our existence and survival. Among them are performative tasks relating to ... More
“In the city of the Addis Ababa, one may observe corrugated sheet roof top covers and fences that seem to be an essential part of the city’s dynamics. My work deals with capturing memories of the common voices, the concerns and thoughts of the city’s residents. By means of incorporating ... More
Deeply engaged with the legacy of Sufism in North Africa, Rachid Koraïchi’s work has been realized over the years in a rich variety of mediums and installations. Referencing the history of calligraphic writing systems, talismans, and mystical symbols, the work connects our challenged present era with a rich sense of ... More
Symbols, stories, characters abound amidst captivating amalgams of video, sound and abstract paintings of nature. The late Farideh Lashai engaged with Iranian politics, society and the human condition. Her influential installations are pervaded by traditional Persian motifs, modernist techniques and a profound sense of injustice. LB02 features one of her ... More
Basir Mahmood’s video works are preoccupied with notions and dialectics of presence and absence, mobility and stasis. In Monument of Arrival and Return, Lahore’s railway station’s luggage-carriers trudge around in an enclosed space. They carry belongs of the artist, who was absent at the time of the work’s making. Moving ... More
Taus Makhacheva’s Seismic Jitters, newly commissioned, for LB02: Niches cast in brass represent missing witnesses. Each acts as revived archeology of the ancient world. Each has its own story that passed through time and culture. The sound, reflected from the walls, is a polyphony of voices, half-stores, half-myths.
Nalini Malani’s 'In Search of Vanished Blood' (2012) is inspired by Christa Wolf’s 1983 novel Cassandra, which offers a way out if only we would learn from the past. The title and the main text in this work come from Agha Shahid Ali’s translation of the Urdu poem 'Lahu Ka ... More
“Ethiopian astronomical time counts a year by 13 months. Accordingly, for each day of the week, there are 5 stars that are constantly in motion, characterized by their own unique intricate lines, color, star and designated image of human beings and animals. This has the purpose of demonstrating the similarity ... More
Amidst the eerie silence shrouding Algeria’s bloody civil war of the 1990s, it’s the cemetery that’s most talkative. Building upon her sustained exploration of the silences that surround traumatic episodes of colonial and post-colonial history, Algerian artist Amina Menia’s Lost Senses revisits the chaotic morbidity of a peculiarly violent moment. ... More
What happens when Islamic metaphysics meets avant-garde Futurism in the nomadic idiom of post-Soviet Asia? Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva’s multimedia installation is a vastly ambitious, newly commissioned exploration of cosmology across the ages. Inspired by the Timurid ruler and astronomer Sultan Ulugh Bek (1394-1449), it combines sci-fi video with live, ... More
Manipulating instruments and machines to forge acoustic content that blurs the boundaries between ‘noise’ and ‘music’, London-based artist Haroon Mirza’s sculptures, performances and immersive installations explore the dynamic interplay between electric current, sound and light. Isra and Mi’raj translates an Indian miniature painting into a mesmerizing score of buzzing, humming ... More
Rabbya Naseer & Hurmat ul Ain’s 'Distance between you and I' is a work that changes its form with every iteration. It aims to address notions of identities and boundaries, which are both personal and collective, permeable and impermeable. The work hints at questions around acts of imposition, freedom to ... More
“Children of Kashmir playing cricket somewhere near Mantalai, located in between journey to Srinagar from Jammu city. Surrounded by mountains and cliffs that makes our eye moment dance and reach the valleys and skies of Kashmir, were blessed by presence of nearby village children who found the ground empty after ... More
“Aru Valley is located at a distance of about 12 kms from Pahalgam. My subject was a school going lad who studied in eighth standard. He lived in the nearby village of middle-class merchants. The intended purpose of taking this picture is to project an innocence that knows no guile, ... More
Ostensibly benign, proper and ‘pure’: women painters dressed as air hostesses enter sites built by powerful men to generate energy on a massive scale - only to subvert the logic of ‘patriotic’ economic development. Saba Khan, Amna Hashmi, Malika Abbas, Natasha Malik, Emaan Shaikh, and Saulat Ajmal are the Pak ... More
Can a sensory experience be both mechanical and natural? Christodoulos Panayiotou’s Gustavia is named after a rare Amazonian plant. In London’s Kew Gardens, its flowers open at night before dropping off. In its natural habitat, the plant releases pollen in response to the buzz of a specific insect, whose vibration ... More
Domestic and intimate, yet simultaneously a marker of Palestinian history, Khalil Rabah’s sprawling mosaics of patchworked, embroidered maps include familiar outlines: the Gaza Strip, the West Bank. Others are imagined landscapes that reconcile isolated parts of the country, or restore the historic dominion of ancient cities. Common Geographies addresses the ... More
Michael Rakowitz’s The Ballad of Special Ops Cody takes as its starting point a 2005 incident in which an Iraqi insurgent group posted a photograph online of a captured US soldier. This soldier was actually Special Ops Cody, a US infantry action figure made to exacting detail. Rakowitz gives life ... More
A graduate of Lahore’s National College of Arts, Mudasar Rashdi’s work is concerned with the power of the image to instill fear in a mediatized world of conflict and securitization. Juxtaposed with video footage of smoldering violence, paintings of the city’s busiest locations reflect states of mind rather than the ... More
My financial hardships and disability have been the focus of my recent work. Through video and paintings I depicted dogs because once I was bitten by dogs in my childhood and I could not walk for a month due to the injures I sustained. Therefore, I have represented this unforgettable ... More
In 2012 Adrián Villar Rojas began the Brick Farm project in his home city in Argentina. Exploring its rural surroundings, he found dozens of abandoned ovenbird nests on trees and electricity poles. Restoring these to trigger dialogue between this Argentine species and flora, fauna, architecture and infrastructure elsewhere, Rojas has ... More
“Rai Abdullah Bhatti, known as Dullah, was a revolutionary from the Punjab. His revolts were aimed at the Mughal empire during Akbar’s rule. Dullah has been omitted from our history, only to be remembered as a bandit. However, he lives in our local folklores as a freedom fighter. Akbar’s paranoia ... More
Abdullah Al Saadi’s work ranges from painting, drawing and the creation of lengthy artists’ notebooks to the collection and systematic categorisation of found objects and the invention of new alphabets. An affinity with nature and rural life informs his practice, which explores the changing environment as well as personal and ... More
The male figure, a prominent and recurrent feature in Anwar Saeed’s prolific body of work, is painted in a variety of postures, hues and settings. A vessel for the representation of inner feelings and social behaviors, Saeed’s sustained and attentive focus on the body explores masculinity and male sociality with ... More
Working across media and disciplines with the debris of everyday life and politics, Mark Salvatus’ ‘Salvage Projects’ juxtapose found objects with other materials through photography and video in installations that explore the national past and its fragments. A work that complicates the relationship between history and fiction, New Society collages ... More
Hrair Sarkissian explores notions of conflict, erasure, destruction and restitution in documentary works revolving around personal and collective memory. Final Flight investigates the story of the endangered northern bald ibis, living descendants of birds depicted in the oldest Egyptian hieroglyphs.
“In this work, I chose to focus on the tenacity of people to survive in places which are often threatening and harsh, highlighting the instinct for survival and the will or desire to make these new places of encounters ‘home’, guided by the wind, the sun, the stars and the ... More
'Sultana’s Reality' is Afrah Shafiq’s immersive, interactive multimedia story exploring the relationship between women and the colonial education movement in British India. Its title is derived from ‘Sultana’s Dream’, the 1905 science-fiction short story of feminist utopia, by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein. Drawing upon archival imagery, women’s writing and historical ... More
Myth and the epic drama of Medieval history are brought to life in Wael Shawky’s magisterial Cabaret Crusades. Loosely inspired by Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, the Egyptian artist’s mesmerizing trilogy deploys the puppetry of exquisite marionettes to chronicle the tragedies of war with sublime beauty and captivating ... More
For over 25 years, Gary Simmons has been exploring the boundaries and intersections of race, identity, art and culture. For LB02 he will recreate his Across The Chalk Line, a site-specific installation and public space for the local community. Raised in a West Indian family, Simmons draws a biographical connection ... More
Friendship of Nations looks to the revolutionary potential of crafts and folklore behind the ideological impulses of two key modern moments: the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and Poland’s Solidarność in the 1980s. Slavs and Tatars see these moments as bookends to the two major geopolitical narratives of the recent past, ... More
Nedko Solakov is a multimedia artist working in diverse fields of practice: drawing, painting, installation, video, and performance. His observations generate non-linear storylines that raise profound questions about truth and contradiction. His work for LB02 is a riveting display of process in which two workers/painters constantly repaint the walls of ... More
“In the Residual Memory project, I investigate certain periods of history recorded in rare, residual photos and video documents of historical traumas. For a long time, information about these periods of history of Kazakhstan was hidden at not only the official level, but also people themselves preferred not to remember ... More
Over the course of a career that has spanned decades, artist Zitta Sultanbayeva has delved into diverse fields of study and practice: graphic design, cinema, criticism, and historical study. From this rich range of inter-disciplinary training and creative expression emerges her work dealing with memory and the archive, art and ... More
Vivan Sundaram is the nephew of the artist Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941). Re-take of Amrita reassembles the original photographs of Amrita taken by her father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, which also depict other family members. In Sundaram’s computer-assisted interventions, these vivid personalities are transported backwards and forwards in time, to settings assembled ... More
Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi have collaborated since 2004, producing joint projects and publishing a bilingual magazine called Pages in Farsi and English. Their works are 'attempts in articulating the indecisive space between art and its historical condition'. Plate It with Silver is a video set along the northern and ... More
Rayyane Tabet’s practice examines the significance of objects and the built environment as they relate to personal and social memory. Fusing conceptual art with pop culture to capture a moment that reverberates in collective memory from South Asia to the Gulf, his project for LB02 revisits Javed Miandad’s iconic last ... More
“Language is one of the biggest inventions of humanity. Writing has been a method of documenting human ideas, information, creative expressions and secrets from private to public usage. In my work, I translate text, convert sounds into pictorial form, and free them from their original purpose of readability and communication.” ... More
Designed to be experienced while moving between the columns of Diwaan- i-Aam in Lahore Fort, Hajra Waheed’s Hum employs humming to explore collective experience. Built by Shah Jahan in 1628, the space was conceived to receive members of the general public to hear their grievances. Hum features eight songs of ... More
Barbara Walker’s new series of site-specific, large-scale wall drawings depict soldiers from the Commonwealth in World War I. Made in charcoal and ephemeral in nature, Walker’s drawings are striking and bold. Acknowledging the contribution of Black servicemen and women to British war efforts is a key concern in Walker’s recent ... More
A room full of machines breathes in disquieted silence. Munem Wasif’s camera moves subtly, often intruding upon objects in space, transforming bodies into sculptural figures. Jute connected Bengal’s peasant smallholders to global capital, and rapidly became the premier packaging material of mid-nineteenth century world trade. The present-day closing of many ... More
Roman Zakhorav uses traditional illustrative methods – graphic sheets of narrative character. Despite this, Roman is constantly looking for new media and semantic ways of self-expression and makes projects - objects, installations and video art. Thematically, the artist explores issues of identification, cultural and historical heritage.
Ayman Zedani’s collaboration for LB02 with Ahmad Makia, 'Between the Heavens and the Earth', stages a display of masks reflecting the polytheistic material culture of pre-Islamic Arabia. Exemplifying rival styles of artistic production during the early seventh century, the installation highlights the contemporary search for a new, Gulf-based subjectivity that ... More
Amina Zoubir’s MUSCICAPIDAE gathers fragments of vinyl records and photos to catalogue, testify, reveal and repair the image of singing nightingales of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. The installation creates poetic links between individual and collective narratives, questions the musical imaginary in accumulated images and exposes the creative abundance of ... More
Ayesha Zulfiqar’s Normal Faults is a thick slice of time that manifests itself in the form of a cross section of earth. Layers of soil, sand and stones are embedded with aspects of material and symbolic significance representing personal and collective consciousness. Like an archaeological specimen, the work is a ... More