Fourth Karachi Biennale KB24
Artist Name: Anna Konik
Country: Poland
Bio: Anna Konik (b. 1974) is an interdisciplinary audio-visual artist. She explores memory, retrospection, emotions, and intuition through experiences of contemporary migrants and marginalized individuals.
Artwork: A Song of Humble Beauty
Medium & Size/Duration: Film; 55 mins.
Art Description: The artist observes artisans of Karachi, Hala, Bhit Shah, District Tando Allahyar, and Mirpurkhas in the Pakistani province of Sindh. The film depicts their story as a complex coexistence of people, animals, and culture which is tested by climate change and neo-colonial policies impacting the production and transportation of food in the Indus region.
Website: www.annakonik.art.pl
Recipient of the KB24 EBM Emerging Artist Prize
Artist Name: Anusha Khawajah Shahid
Country: Pakistan
Bio: Lahore-based visual artist, Anusha Khawajah Shahid is a recent graduate of NCA.
Art Work: Hawah’s Garden: Threads of Nature
Medium: Charpai (traditional bed) pottery, wood, mixed grains and water.
Art Description: The work integrates symbolism and communal themes, using the idea of a Charpai, a traditional bed that is woven by hand by women of South Asian communities. Besides being an item of everyday usage, the Charpai is a symbol of cultural traditions of collectivity. A group of Charpais forms a Baithak, a shared space where people come together, signifying a powerful metaphor for unity and strength, both within families and the broader community. Inviting the public to interact with the weaving process of the Charpai it reinforces the aspect of ‘togetherness’, which is also something women do to bring together family members. This blend of physical structure, visual symbolism, and interactive engagement is a compelling way to explore the themes of community, tradition, and the essential role of women in sustaining these practices. The installation is also intended to bring color into Bagh Ibne Qasim, highlighting Iqbal’s famous verse, “vajūd-e-zan se hai tasvīr-e-kā.enāt meñ rang. Isī ke saaz se hai zindagī kā soz-e-darūñ”, which highlights how the existence and efforts of women bring color to the world.
Artist Name: Asif Khan
Country: Pakistan
Bio: Asif Khan is a multimedia artist and art educator with interests in mergers of digital and analogue imagery, and mediums. Khan is inspired by the cultural landscape of Lahore.
Artwork: Once Upon A Landscape
Medium & Size/Duration: Single channel video, 3:25 min
Art Description: This video presents an aerial view of the effect of climate change and urbanization on the agricultural landscape of Punjab. Documented by a drone camera, the work considers the impact of social consequences on food security and its broader implications for human rights in Pakistan.
Website: www.asifkhan.com
Artist Name: Ayesha Jatoi
Country: Pakistan, Lahore
Bio: Ayesha Jatoi (b.1979) is a trained miniature painter and photographer. Her practice explores the relationship between image, text, and space in traditional manuscripts.
Artwork: Flesh & Blood
Medium & Size/Duration: Installation, steel bowls & plates filled with red liquid and found rubble.
Art Description: This installation of 62 steel plates and bowls is filled with a blood-like liquid and rubble and placed in an unsuspecting location with people passing by. Interspersed with images of influencers scrolled through our social media, the work is an eerie reminder of the realities of the Gaza genocide.
Website: https://www.ayesha-jatoi.com/
Artist Name: Becca Voelcker
Country: United Kingdom
Bio: Becca Voelcker is a film historian and cultural critic who writes on film, art, and visual culture under political and ecological themes.
Artwork: Growing Food & Film
Medium & Size/Duration: Sound installation, 10 minutes.
Art Description: This experimental essay travels into little-known archives of farming collectives in 1970s Japan and Mali. The narration and photographs document unusual experiments in sustainable food production and testify to their makers’ understanding of land and social justice.
Website: https://www.beccavoelcker.com
Artist Name: Bita Razavi
Country : Iran / Finland
Bio: Bita Razavi ( born 1983) lives between Helsinki and Mahu , Estonia. Her practice is centered around observations and reflections on a variety of everyday situations and is highly influenced by where she is based at the time. She examines the inner workings of social systems in relations with the socio-political structures and national events of historic proportions in various countries.
Artwork: Bita’s Dowry , 2015
Medium: photographs and sound
Art Description: The series of photographs feature some of the objects that Bita’s Iranian grandmother collected for her dowry. Most of them were bought during her childhood, which coincided with the Iran- Iraq war. The project reflects on the common attitude of gathering, and saving for the future in the generation that experienced the war on one hand , and the past generation’s idea of marriage and the significance of a dowry on the other hand. The accompanying audio recording features her grandmother’s description of the items and reasons for including them in her collection.
Artist Name: Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl
Country: Sweden
Bio: The duo of Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl have developed a research-based method and an art form comprising staging, choreographed movement, instructions, and immersive technologies, juxtaposed with material objects and the human ability to organize perception into a world.
Artwork: River Biographies / That WhichIs Not You but of Which You are a Part
Medium & Size/Duration: Installation: river, stone; Performance
Art Description: The installation allows visitors to explore the relationships between natural elements that form a river. Half the visitors wear sightless goggles and are led by the other half who are guided by a voice in their headphones. By embodying qualities of water and stone, and extending their sensory experience into another body, visitors engage in building relations of trust with each other.
Website: http://www.lundahl-seitl.com/
Artist Name: Daniela Zambrano Almidón
Country: Peru / Germany
Bio: Daniela is a Peruvian researcher and Quechua artist based in Berlin. Currently, she conducts art workshops, decolonial literature, and artistic mediation, and co-organizes cultural events in Berlin through the Peruvian intercultural center “Todas las Sangres”, in cooperation with the Forum of Colonialism and Resistance – BARAZANI Berlin.
Artwork: Colonial History of Potatoes
Medium & Size/Duration: Ceramic sculptures, sound, fabric (tapestry), live cooking (potatoes and other food items)
Art Description: My artistic practice is linked to transit, movement, memory and the intersection of histories and perspectives, from a viewpoint of the Andean global south. The common history of colonial dispossession has also brought with it the memory of the land, and of the knowledge surrounding it. In the same way, migration has arrived and continues to arrive in different parts of the world.
Artist Name: Eliana Otta
Country: Peru / Austria
Bio: Eliana Otta Vildoso (b. 1981) is a Peruvian artist and curator working with themes in ecology, labor, and gender inequality through a feminist, poetic, and political lens.
Artwork: Payment to Land
Medium & Size/Duration: Mixed technique sculptures with household materials – thread, cloth, shoes, seeds.
Art Description: This work shows challenges of food insecurity brought on by climate change and economic crises. Here, protest banners linked with images of agricultural products common to Pakistan and Peru are mounted in the shoes of the workers. Grains and herbs are laid on the ground as a reference to a traditional Peruvian practice of making offerings to the soil.
Website: https://eliana-otta.com/
Artist Name: Enora Lalet
Country: France
Bio: Enora Lalet (b.1986) is a French food artist whose creations are inspired by her travels and diverse cultures. Lalet works with photographers.
Artwork: Vanishing Creature
Medium & Size/Duration: Performance, Food art
Art Description: The Vanish Creature is a hybrid character situated halfway between the imaginary and the material world. The chimera spans the border between the invisible, inner world, and the visible tangible world of mythology. The work invites audiences to confront their fears, values, and vices.
Website: https://www.enoralalet.com/
Artist Name: Farida Batool
Country: Pakistan
Bio: Farida Batool (b. 1970) is a visual artist interested in politics and history. She is an active member of the Awami Art Collective.
Artwork: Daney Pe Likha Hai
Medium & Size/Duration: Sculpture, iron barbed wire, sound and projection.
Art Description: This installation addresses the ethics and politics of modern wheat cultivation and its impacts on consumption methods. The sculpture of a wheat field accompanies a video and sound installation exploring the role of women in preserving culinary traditions amid threats to food security in Pakistan and Gaza.
Website: https://faridabatool.com/
Artist Name: Fatima Majeed, Fazal Rizvi, Ahmer Naqvi, Luluwa Lokhandwala and Shabbir Mohammed
Country: Pakistan
Bio: Fazal Rizvi (b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Karachi and Hunza. His interest lies in exploring seas and mountains through personal, social, and political views.
Shabbir Mohammed is a writer, designer, and visual artist. He works across disciplines of video, photography, animation, and illustration to tell stories.
Ahmer Naqvi is a freelance writer and creative consultant. His work focuses on pop culture, particularly cricket, music, and food.
Fatima Majeed is an activist based in Ibrahim Hyderi, who has been active in fighting for the rights of her people, Karachi’s indigenous fisherfolk community.
Luluwa Lokhandwala is a research-based artist and designer, and an illustrator based in Karachi. She teaches design at Habib University and Beaconhouse National University.
Artwork: The Table – Mahigeer aur Hum
Medium & Size/Duration: Table, reclaimed wood from fishing boats; recipes; music, interactive workshop.
Art Description: Together with Fatima Majeed, an activist from the Ibrahim Hyderi Mahigeer community, the artists invite visitors to gather at The Table to witness recipes that are a repository of indigenous coastal culture.
Artist Name: Salim Bayri and Ghita Skali
Country: Morocco / Netherlands
Bio:
Salim Bayri is a Morocco-born multimedia visual artist working with sculpture, performance, drawing, coding, tech, and the virtual realm.
Ghita Skali is a Morocco-born multidisciplinary artist working with installations, videos, and interventions.
Artwork: Sunflower Seed Project
Medium: Sunflower seeds and cooling set-up.
Art Description: This project acts as a new layer to the duo’s previous installation Sunflower Seeds are for Birds (2018) and is closely related to the economic replacing of food crops in Pakistan with the country’s cash crops. The work contains a soundscape, sculptural roasters, and sunflower seeds that are available for visitors, for consumption, to assess if seeds can replace food.
Website: www.salimbayri.com
www.ghitaskali.com
Artist Name: Imran Ahmed Khan
Country: Pakistan, Lahore
Bio: Imran Ahmed Khan (b. 1974) is a Lahore-based visual artist. His practice is inspired by the city’s colonial past and tense present, mechanics, crafts, and recycling-based small-scale industries.
Artwork: Mṛttikā
Medium & Size/Duration: Installation, five tandoors (clay ovens); audio installation within tandoors in Punjabi, Urdu, English and Sindhi.
Art Description: Khan’s installation invites audiences to consider the connection between food, culture, politics, and humanity. Drawing on Sufi beliefs of having faith in God’s provision, the work recreates the local tradition of serving and eating food communally as audiences gather for storytelling and poetry recitals.
Artist Name: Karolina Brzuzan
Country: Poland
Bio: Karolina Brzuzan was born in 1983 in Poland. Karolina Brzuzan’s practice explores the mechanisms governing our social life, from the basis of individual and personal experience of history.
Artwork: Nofood- starvation cookbook
Medium & Size/Duration: Interactive website and performance
Art Description: In this project, the artist has reconstructed dishes created for and used in cases of extreme starvation and hunger. Starting from the assumption that the condition of the world is accurately reflected in an empty plate, the work engages with the themes of war, corruption, land grabbing, famine and genocide through the lived experience of those these issues directly affect. The proposal of the nofood – starvation cookbook is an invitation to sympathize with what is on the daily menu of millions of people.
Artist Name: Khushboo
Country: Pakistan
Bio: Khushboo is a documentary filmmaker from Gilgit-Baltistan. She highlights issues of environment, mental health, and disability faced by inhabitants of her local region.
Artwork: Fading Heave
Medium & Size/Duration: Documentary 45 min.
Art Description: Khushboo’s documentary follows Muhammad Ali, a resident of Morko Valley in Gilgit Baltistan, where the community is facing a food and employment crisis amidst rising temperatures, a glacial melt, and disruptions in the irrigation channels.
Artist Name: Lina Persson
Country: Sweden
Bio: Lina Persson (b. 1978) is an artistic researcher with an interest in ‘narrative storyworlds and animated worldbuilding’. She develops collaborative and transdisciplinary projects that explore sustainable systems.
Artwork: Marigold Entanglements
Medium & Size/Duration: Installation; contract, beehive and bees, bee drinking fountains, marigold flowers.
Art Description: The installation is an ecosystem that enables bees to perform their necessary roles of gathering pollen and feeding their hive. The artist appoints a legal status to the bees as visitors act as agents safeguarding their rights.
Website: https://linapersson.se/
Artist Name: Luis Carlos Tovar
Country: Colombia
Bio: Luis Carlos Tovar (b. 1979) is a visual artist based in Paris and Bogota. His practice integrates photography, engraving, collage, and video installation.
Artwork: Coal Portraits
Medium & Size/Duration: 30 photographs, piezography process on Bright White Hahnemuhle paper 310g, 17 x 23.6 in / 39.4 x 59 in; Video installation, 2:29 min, Color HD Film.
Art Description: This photo essay contains testimonies of residents of four Colombian artisanal fishing communities that have been affected by the local mining conflict. However, the issue of the violation of their rights has been overshadowed by the ecological disaster caused by the miner’s landing.
Artist Name: Mahreen Zuberi
Country: Pakistan
Bio: Mahreen Zuberi (b. 1981) was trained in miniature painting at the National College of Arts, Lahore. Her work explores issues of gender and identity through a feminist lens.
Artwork: In Proportions
Medium & Size/Duration:
Art Description: The artist examines local systems of belief and knowledge through the positioning of the divine rizq against material ideas of food security. The installation encourages audiences to understand the entanglement of the sacred and secular in South Asian culture.
Artist Name: Marlene Hausegger & Hannes Zebedin
Country: Austria
Marlene Hausegger
Bio: Marlene Hausegger (b.1984) is a multidisciplinary artist with an interest in social rules and dynamics within public spaces.
Hannes Zebedin
Bio: Hannes Zebedin (b.1976) is an artist and writer with training in performative sculpture and installation.
Artwork:
Medium & Size/Duration: Installation; Recycled oil cans, bricks, mud, and plants.
Art Description: In this work, a ‘pipeline’ made from recycled oil cans, relating to the dependency on sunflower cooking oil originally imported from Europe. Feed ‘islands’ are filled with mud from the Indus River and plants from the Indus Valley Civilization. The installation highlights the economic mechanisms regarding the global demand of food and their impact on indigenous agricultural systems.
Website: http://mmhhh.com/
Artist Name: Monika Emmannuelle Kazi
Country: France / Switzerland
Bio: Monika Emmannuelle Kazi (b. 1991) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Congo and France. Her practice examines connections of body memory with domestic spaces, objects, and architecture.
Artwork: A Home Care – machine learning
Medium & Size/Duration: Installation, performance art. Soil, water, milk powder.
Art Description: Five performers in a ‘kitchen’ transform water into milk using a made-in Switzerland milk powder. The producer of the powder has been criticized for low-quality dairy products for children, which are exported specifically to developing countries in West Africa. The work focuses on the kitchen as a place where culture is transmitted through repetition of physical acts.
Artist Name: Muge Yilmaz
Country: Turkey / Netherlands
Bio: Muge Yilmaz (b. 1985) is a Turkish artist. She envisions speculative narratives inspired by feminist sci-fi which explores contradictions around protection, preservation, and scarcity.
Artwork: Three Hundred Sisters
Medium & Size/Duration:
Art Description: The artist grows 300 varieties of maize amid oak wood sculptures shaped like corn. The work illustrates biodiversity of this important food staple and is a protest of monoculture cultivation for commercial purposes.
Website: www.mugeyilmaz.com
Artist Name: Nabiha Khan
Country: Pakistan
Bio: Nabiha Khan is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and academic based in Lahore.
Artwork: Spice-Unscape
Medium & Size/Duration:
Art Description: The artist creates an aromatic narrative that is nostalgic and political through an interplay of top, base, and middle (scent) notes. The material qualities of the tapestry encourage audiences to consider cultural identity, disparities, and hierarchies in society and global trade.
Artist Name: Nadeem Alkarimi
Country: Pakistan
Bio: Nadeem Alkarimi is an independent filmmaker from the Hunza Valley. He explores disruptions caused by local infrastructural development in the Valley’s ecology and culture.
Artwork: Film “The last act”.
Installation “Dismantling life”.
Medium & Size/Duration: Film, 20 minutes; Dome made from discarded commercial food packaging.
Art Description: Processed staple foods introduced after the construction of the Karakoram Highway have damaged nutrition and cultivation habits of the Hunza people. Alkarimi’s film reflects on the detrimental impact of urbanization on the region.
Artist Name: Naiza Khan
Country: United Kingdom / Pakistan
Bio: Naiza Khan (b.1968) is a Pakistani artist whose practice centers on research, documentation, and mapping-based exploration. She investigates geography within the context of power, colonial history, and collective memory.
Artwork: The Streets are Rising 2013
Kurrachee, Past, Present and Future, 2012-13
Spill, 2016
Medium & Size/Duration: Painting; Sound installation.
Art Description: The paintings explore the entanglement of bodies of water, land/scapes, and infrastructure, both historical and contemporary; weaving issues of land contestation, borders, and the extraction of natural resources. Each work manifests as a multi-layered map, emerging from a practice of walking the city and its environs, and an extensive research process.
Website: https://www.naizakhan.com/
Artist Name: Paloma Ayala
Country: Switzerland
Bio: Paloma Ayala (b. 1980) is a Mexican visual artist focused on the connections between human and non-human species, and community care at the US-Mexico border.
Artwork: Que no me quiten ni la lengua ni las patas (Take anything but my tongue and feet)
Medium & Size/Duration: Film, 28 minutes.
Art Description: The film depicts community norms which the artist’s family of agriculturalists will lose when their farmland is developed into a residential area after extensive irrigation and plantation. The work reimagines ‘cracks as resistance’ to reclaim the family’s cultural traditions.
Website: www.palomaayala.com
Artist Name: Qadir Jhatial
Country: Pakistan, Hyderabad
Bio: Qadir Jhatial (b. 1986) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Lahore.
Artwork: Boat
Medium & Size/Duration: Installation, wooden boat, sand.
Art Description: This installation explores the roles played by boats in the ecosystem of the Sindhu River. As symbols of survival, the boats are vessels that undertake risky journeys in search of sustenance.
Artist Name: Sadqain
Country: Pakistan
Bio: Sadqain (b. 1988) is an art practitioner, educator, and designer based in Lahore. His practice explores complexities of shame, impurity, and memory in relationship to the body under a social and religious context.
Artwork: Water Spill and Nala
Medium & Size/Duration: Installation 1, concrete, water, water pumps; Installation 2, plaster, pigment.
Art Description: The work invites the audience to examine the various meanings of filth and purity using contaminated water spills and water bodies. It also exposes the role played by time, speed, and sensory perception in the making of meaning in various acts.
Artist Name:Sepideh Rahaa
Country: Finland / Iran
Bio: Sepideh Rahaa (b. 1981) is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and educator based in Helsinki. Through her practice she actively investigates and questions the prevailing power structures, social norms and conventions while focusing on womanhood, storytelling and everyday life and resistances.
Artwork: Songs to Earth, Songs to Seeds
Medium & Size/Duration: Video Installation. duration 20 mins
Art Description:
The artist portrays the poetic but often invisible and inaccessible process of rice cultivation in Mazandaran, Northern Iran. The process, which takes almost a year , is an intergenerational tradition , with knowledge being passed down for over a century through the artist’s family. Her visual narrative is intertwined with local songs of daily struggles sung by women during cultivation and harvest, and are passed down through the female members of the family. The work also highlights food politics, particularly how Iranian farmers are forced by sanctions to use toxic chemical fertilisers, and speaks to social and environmental injustice.
Artist Name: Tamasha Collective
Saamia Vine, Mohsin Shafi, Sarah Khan, Meeta Mastani, Fatima Saeed, Shireen Bano, Talha Ali Kushwaha, Dhruv Sangari
Country: Pakistan/India/USA
Bio: Tamasha Collective comprises diaspora South Asians skilled in miniature painting, photography, film, textile design, printmaking, block printing, singing, music, linguistics, botany, and nutrition, and art educators. The collective seeks to elevate the diversity and cultural richness of the regions they embody, from ancient times to the present.
Artwork: Glorious Hotel
Medium & Size/Duration: Triptych of videos, xx min; Installation, fairy lights, wood, metal, fabric.
Art Description: The Collective artists invite onlookers to a mela-like atmosphere filled with visuals, sounds, and smells leading up to a multi-video installation at the pavilion. The triptych of videos is a meditation on the multitudes of cultures embodied by the collective with a focus on South Asia’s foodways.
Artist Name: Tino Sehgal
Country: Germany/UK
Bio: Tino Sehgal (b. 1976) is a German Indian artist based in Berlin. He is acclaimed for his undocumented performances involving ‘constructed situations’ ─ live encounters between visitors and performers. The fleeting specificity of these encounters is generated through active participation of visitors and lives on in the form of stories owned by those who witness the performances.
Artwork: Untitled
Medium: Live Art
Art Description: The artist invites community engagement in his two-week-long performance comprising ‘constructed situations’ which explore Sufi spiritual and classical dance forms of Sindh. The performance reflects human interaction within a global insecure environment, human pleasures, and Sufi teachings of dance and bodily movement regarded as food for the soul.