Asma Jahangir Award for Cultural Contribution Towards Social Justice
Research GrantGrant Amount: PKR 500,000*
Awarded to an individual or collective who has rendered significant cultural contributions to advance social justice in Pakistan. Practices may include any medium(s) of artistic and cultural expression, such as visual arts, cinema, dance, theater, music, literature, as well as educational and institutional contributions. The juried Award will be given every two years coinciding with the Lahore Biennale cycle.
The 2018 Award recognizes the life and work of Pakistan’s eminent artist and social activist Lala Rukh (1948-2017).
Award for scholarship to an individual or a collective to conduct original research on any aspect of the life and work of Lala Rukh. Applicants proposed their interest and field of research, on various aspects of Lala Rukh’s body of artwork, activism, and academic and institutional contributions.
Mariah Lookman received this award for a research project on the life and work of Lala Rukh, titled Measuring Time: Index and Register. Lookman has focused on writing a scholarly essay on the significance of Lala Rukh’s work, Black Mirror (1993).
Biography of Mariah Lookman:
Mariah Lookman is an artist, educationalist and on occasion curator specializing in studio and process centered research based practice combined with teaching methods that thrive on the crossovers between making and writing. Most recently Mariah was Academic Consultant and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Technological Arts, SVIAS, Eastern University, Sri Lanka (2017-2019). She has held Adjunct Researcher post at Tate Modern in London (2018). As an educationalist she works on institution building and curricula innovation. She is especially interested in areas of post-conflict rebuilding through the arts. Mariah Lookman has a BA from National College of Arts, Lahore, MA from the Slade School of Fine Art and DPhil from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford in 2015.
Distinguished Mentor for this grant:
Saloni Mathur
Professor
Modern and Contemporary South Asian art Department of Art History
University of California, Los Angeles
Saloni Mathur is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, editor of The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora, and co-editor (with Kavita Singh) of No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia. Her latest book is A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art (Duke University Press, 2019).
Lahore Biennale Foundation