Urbanities – Art & Public Space in Pakistan

Consistent with the larger discourse surrounding the inaugural Lahore Biennale to be held in 2017, Urbanities is a collaborative project between the Goethe-Institut Pakistan and the Lahore Biennale Foundation. Recollecting Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” for critical discussion, it seeks to provoke thought, spark artistic interventions and bring to the fore Pakistan’s contested urban space. The project also served to contribute to a trajectory leading to the Lahore Biennale in 2017 in a series of events.

Different formats like workshops, artistic research, an artists’ residency, and a consecutive programme of talks, discussions and exhibitions slated for the end of the year, reflected on the current definitions of mapping, notions of community and practice, the usage of space, urban spatiality and visuality, the global, local and glocal in relation to the city in flux, on stagnation, progress, artivism and action, on accustomed and contested space, on environmentalism and public art, amongst the various other aspects of cities, space and the urban realm.

Urbanities Events
•  a workshop on copyright, intellectual property and information sharing with reference to art and law in Pakistan, July 2016
•  an artists residency for two artists from Germany who  were invited to engage with Lahore and Karachi as sites of urban exploration and artistic research between the months of October – November 2016
•  a symposium of lectures, panel discussions, workshops and exhibitions, took place in Lahore, December 2016