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Curatorial Vision
Tomorrow | کل
The 5th edition of Karachi Biennale, is presented as a maiden voyage for Tomorrow, positing Karachi as an urban archipelago of invention, mythologies, and habitats, where sediments of the past and horizons of the future mingle in brackish currents. KB27 is a dedication for the hopeful Tomorrow.
Archives are a haunting reminder of the politics of representation and their access, as well as how profoundly a national, continental, or global narrative can change when the geo-political voyage of the narrator is altered.
Today, Karachi stands at another threshold. Its ecological precarity, the choked mangroves, rising sea levels, and poisoned waters converge with the pressures of unplanned urbanisation, sectarian and ethnic confrontations, and the contested memories of its identity. To address Karachi only as a site of crisis, however, is to miss its role as a locus invention. Its polyphony of languages, its diasporic extensions across continents, and its indigenous knowledge of the sea and tides all testify to a living archive of reinvention that can be mirrored through legends and lived realities across the world.
Tomorrow positions Karachi not merely as a backdrop but as a protagonist in the global conversation on art and its responsibilities. The thematic of the Biennale takes from the hope of a ship’s first voyage, but redirects it away from conquest and commerce toward inclusivity and imagination. This is not a voyage of return to an originary past, but of departure into possible futures. It is a call to artists, thinkers, governments and publics to embark collectively on an expedition to reimagine tomorrow.
The thematic of KB27 also recalls Édouard Glissant’s, The Open Boat, where his essay concludes with the idea that “our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone”.
Tomorrow, hosted by a city formed through migrations and displacements, embodies Glissant’s notion that identities are never fixed but continually reshaped. KB27, therefore chooses public spaces, ports, and parks as the forum in which to have this conversation. It seeks to create conditions in which artists can engage with the public, not as a resolution but to generate new images, scientific innovation, languages, and practices through which Karachi, and the world beyond it, may be reimagined.
In positioning itself as a voyage, KB27 affirms the conviction that tomorrow must be collective. Here, art is not a mirror but a vessel through which to tether us into our future.
About the Curator
Noor Ahmed
Noor Ahmed is curator of Karachi Biennale 2027. She is co-curator of River Landscapes, a project between South Asia and Europe, that creates a transdisciplinary glossary of water with support from Pro Helvetia. In 2021 she was part of the team curating the Pakistan Pavilion at Dubai Expo 2020, which won a silver award amongst 192 countries at the World Expo. She was Project Director/Lead Curator of the ‘Digital Curation of Lahore and Taxila Museums’, Pakistan’s largest museum digitisation project, that was supported by the World Bank and executed by the Government of Punjab, and The Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP) and from 2022-2025 she was also heading CAP, one of the most robust digital archives in South Asia. In 2019 she was Assistant Curator for Karachi Biennale 2019. Her writings on contemporary art and culture appear in international and local publications.