Artist/Collectives: Alecia Neo
Collaborators: Chong Li-Chuan/ Composer-Sound Designer, Andy Lim | ARTFACTORY/ Technical Support
Country: Singapore
Medium: Light & Sound Score, Wires, light bulbs, motion sensors with double-sided mirrors and video projection mapping
Art Description: Inspired by Saddar’s rich historical significance, ‘Power to the People’, is an ode to people whose labor builds and sustains a city. Moving hands and symbolic objects honor the different lives and labor of the people who have resided and contributed to the history, legacy, and vibrancy of Saddar. A network of interconnected wires, light bulbs, and mirrors, layers the room within Hamid Market. The work performs along with the building through shadow and light.
Bio: Alecia Neo, an artist and cultural worker, practices through photography, video installations, and participatory workshops reframing art as an expression of radical
Credits: National Arts Council, Binjai Tree
Artist/Collectives: Amin Gulgee
Collaborators: Laeeq Akbar/Fashion designer; Pomme Amina Gohar/ Fashion Mentor for students/ Lighting advisor, Talhakaar/Technical advisor, NJV School Students
Country: Pakistan
Medium: Installation, controlled triggered lights, arduinos,, mirror, copper, turmeric, steel, copper with nickel plate, zircon, iron and fishing wire
Art Description: ‘Memory Room’ is the artist’s attempt to maintain a “wholeness of the self.” Amin Gulgee’s “witnesses of the past,” his “friends,” are the objects that surround him in his home. In this room, each one becomes a mark of an emotion and experience that the artist has had. Research has shown that memories of smell can last as long as a year. Eye movements will be manipulated in this darkened room using changing colored lights. This installation overlaps with two performances: ‘The Un-Remembering’ and ‘The Forgotten March’, where Gulgee co-creates an imagined pre-history with a fashion designer.
Bio: Amin Gulgee is an artist-curator living and working in Karachi. Gulgee works with sculpture, installation, and performance. His practice looks at unlikely connections to uncover different narratives in relation to South Asian spirituality and gender.
Artist/Collectives: Amin Rehman
Collaborator: karen darricades/ AR Tech
Country: Canada
Medium: Encaustic Painting with melted bee wax, colour pigment, resin and damar
varnish mixture, Augmented Reality (AR), Video, Photography, Animation
Art Description: ‘Water Wars’ highlights that water is absolutely political and becoming more so through scarcity, national ownership, and boundaries. The Indus River Delta increases, and the Arabian Sea encroaches on the sweet water of the Indus River, which is in turn polluted by our sewerage. In the Indus Basin, on the extremely fertile agricultural lands, real estate mafia is building housing societies for great profits. The Karez water system in Balochistan is drying up. River Ravi in Lahore is choked with waste. Water Wars addresses the changing climate in the Indus River basin regions by 2040. Like water defies the boundaries of land, video, and photo meet to defy location through augmented reality.
Bio: Amin Rehman is a multidisciplinary visual artist who has been exhibiting since the 1980s. His work comments on the current effects of systems of domination by nation-states in power over others.
karen darricades is a multidisciplinary, new media artist and educator. karen uses Augmented Reality to make communal and interactive artworks.
Credits: Canada Council for the Arts, Shehla and Ali Adil, SAGA Foundation
Artist/Collectives: Andreas Lutz
Country: Germany
Medium: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Kinetic Sculpture (Audio + Visual); Actuators, LED lights, stretchable fabric, custom software
Art Description: What if there is an inner dialogue by a machine before it communicates to the outside world? Does a self-aware machine have a certain image of itself? How does that change the interaction between a machine and a human being? In this kinetic encounter, people will meet the ‘Monolith’’s primal thoughts that arise from the language of the machine: its 25 binary states.
Bio: Andreas Lutz’s practice explores communication between machine systems and people. Lutz looks at the relationship between perception and reality through sound, sign, and sculpture.
Credits: Goethe Institut
Artist/Collectives: Audio Placebo Plaza
Erin Gee, Julia E. Dyck and Vivian Li
Country: Canada
Medium: Collaborative and Community-driven Sound Art
Art Description: ‘Audio Placebo Plaza’ is a participatory work that invites everyone to take appointments to discuss how an audio placebo could help improve their lives. Daily issues that people may struggle with can be brought to the table. Through this, a variety of audio techniques are developed to provide care. Music is made to create repair.
Bio: Audio Placebo Plaza (APP) with Erin Gee, Julia E. Dyck, and Vivian Li/ Canada is a trio of woman-identified and non-gender conforming artists based in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke. They center intersectional feminism by expressing ways of caring, emotional labour, and making community through collaborative performance and sound art.
Credits: CALQ – Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec
Artist/Collectives: Bilal Jabbar
Country: Pakistan
Medium: Found Objects (Kitchen Bowl), Auto-electronic Motors, Sensors, and Light
Art Description: The subconscious mind is a ‘Wall of Thoughts’ with a number of fascinating stories residing within it. It could be a place of zen or a battle of chaos. Bilal uses his amalgamation of domestic cutlery and auto-electronic machines to engage the viewer in a new atmospheric experience that could be a reflection of their own subconscious. The work is interactive and only works while it is in motion within the space.
Bio: Bilal Jabbar is the winner of KB22 Engro Emerging Artist prize. He is a visual artist in Karachi, graduated from Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. His works explore various forms of kinetics, understanding mechanisms with different materials and systems.
Artist/Collectives: Cosmic Tribe
Rayan Khan/ Tech Integration- Codes Design & Ayesha Mubarak Ali/ Tech Artist- Creative Director
Collaborators: Oshii Brownie, Sikander Ali Khan, Hamza Mubarak, Yusra Taqi /Technical Support Team, Wahab Shah/Director of Choreography, Emad Rehman/ Sound Design, Salman Sabir/ Coordination and Management
Country: Pakistan
Medium: Hybrid Media Wearable Art, Live Interactive Performance
Art Description: ‘Sentient of Lights’ uses an experimental approach to scientific data. A character named Sentient educates the viewer on how light pollution harms living beings. Non-physical material like light is made tangible to bring attention to how this aspect of pollution is neglected. This digitally created new media performance includes AI-generated visuals and art that can be worn.
Bio: Cosmic Tribe explores a range of upcoming technologies through visual expression, campaign designs, and performances that address social issues in a unique way.
Credits: 3D Wearable Phygital Designs by Oshii Brownie
Artist/Collectives: Dennis Rudolph
Country: Germany
Medium: Augmented Reality (AR)
Art Description: The supernatural has always been a source of interest amongst artists. What if a mythical figure was to appear and guide the visitor to experience a 200 years old book? The 200 year old illustrated copy of Firdousi’s ‘Shahnama’ in the NJV School library is brought to life through Augmented Reality. Rudolph uses his ‘3D’ paintings through the Simurgh App to create a new ‘virtual’ way of connecting to one of the longest epic Persian poems, the Shahnamah (977–1010 CE). AR drawings meet the mythical history of Persia’s golden days.
Bio: Dennis Rudolph is a conceptual artist working in augmented reality, virtual reality, and painting. His artistic practice looks at history, culture, and 3D visuals.
Credits: Goethe Institut
Artist/Collectives: Giselle Beiguelman
Country: Brazil
Medium: Generative Imaging, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Video, Photographs
Art Description: The world is a garden, whose weeds must be eliminated – is a saying that defends ‘scientific’ racism (eugenics). ‘Botannica Triannica’ is an investigation of the naming process of nature and how it is affected by colonialism and other systems of oppression. These scientific and popular names of plants and vegetation reflect the prejudice that exists against marginalized people. Giselle Beiguelman creates a post-natural garden from images and videos of plants manipulated by Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a decolonial narrative. She highlights “weeds” as resistant and resilient life forms infiltrating real and digital gardens.
Bio: Giselle Beiguelman is an award-winning artist, professor at the University of Sao Paulo and the author of several writings on digital culture. Beiguelman’s recent work investigates the colonialist imagination using AI technologies.
Credits: Embassy of Brazil
Artist/Collectives: Herwig Scherabon
Collaborators: Joshua Alena Mallek/ Digital art assistance, Students at the Visual Studies Department, Karachi University/assistance
Country: Austria
Medium: 2-channel audiovisual installation, Full HD projectors, 3D printing sculpture
Art Description: The context of a place is the most fascinating and diverse palette of raw materials available to an artist. Driven by the geography, history, and data of Karachi, the narrative of the city and its expansion are explored. Through the old ruins of Bhambhore (1st Century BCE) and the Landfill Jam Chakro at the edge of Karachi, the work allows the viewer to go beyond human time to understand the issue of land, ecology, and global warming. The work takes the form of a diptych video installation with visual projections and a sculpture representing an imagined archeological artifact from a future past.
Bio: Herwig Scherabon (Berlin-based) works with CGI, virtual reality (VR), and audiovisual installations. Scherabon has a long-lasting relationship with landscapes/nature and is interested in the qualities of large-scale phenomena.
Credits: the Federal Ministry Republic of Austria Arts Culture Civil Service and Sport,
Austrian Embassy Pakistan
Artist/Collectives: Imran Qureshi
Country: Pakistan
Medium: Sound, Neon lights, Video Projection installation
Art Description: In ‘Deen O Dunya’, the residents of a local neighborhood go through profound physical and emotional experiences when their homes, streets, and entire neighborhoods undergo an intense transformation. Qureshi focuses on the layers that are added to the facades of homes and cover entire neighborhoods. Through video projection and sound-based work, the boundaries of religious rituals, culture, and modern technology merge in a carnivalesque form.
Bio: Imran Qureshi expands the language of miniature painting in the form of site-specific installations, three-dimensional works, videos, and paintings. His work continues to be firmly rooted in the tradition of miniature painting.
Credits: Partial Funding by Mr. Tommaso Corvi Mora, Mr. Shahzad Ahmed
Artist/Collectives: Invisible Flock with Faqir Zulfiqar and Allah Jurrio
Country: UK, Pakistan
Medium: Microtonal, clay and circuitry, generative sound and performance
Art Description: ‘Microtonal’ takes the form of an interactive, data-driven sound sculpture created from 200 Borindos made by Allahjurrio and Faqir Zulfiqar in Badin. The Borindo is an instrument that can be dated back 5,000 years and was resurrected by the Faqir’s father and Allahjurrio. Through sound, the work uses this deep cultural and personal history with the objects to explore the encoded symbolism held within this instrument.
Bio: Invisible Flock creates sense-based installations and environments that prompt people to renegotiate an emotional relationship with the natural world. Invisible Flock is a multi award-winning interactive arts studio that places itself at the intersection of art, technology, and the environment.
Allah Jurrio is a 90 year old potter based in Badin, he is one of the few known craftsmen who create the Borindo.
Faqir Zulfiqar is a Sindhi folk musician and maker. He plays the Borindo and is largely responsible for preserving this musical instrument from cultural extinction.
Credits: British Council
Artist/Collectives: Justine Emard
Country: France
Medium: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics, Video Documentation
Art Description: Using a deep learning AI system, Co(AI)xistence creates an artistic medium between data and human motion. A primitive intelligence interacts with a human through signals, body, and spoken language with their different intelligences. Mirai Moriyama, Japanese actor and dancer, interacts, face to face, with a robot based on a neuronal system. The AI robot (Ikegami and Ishiguro lab) learns from their experience but embodies a different non-human way of understanding things. The human and the robot try to define new perspectives of coexistence in the world.
Bio: Justine Emard is a visual artist. She lives and works in Paris. Her artworks explore the new relationships that are being established between our existences and technologies.
Artist/Collectives:KCR Studio
Concept Design: Jahanzeb Safder – Audio-Visual Programming, Sound Design, Curation
Murtaza Tunio – Hardware Tech, A/V
Collaborators: Irfan Ali Taj/ Chitrali Musician
Daniel A. Panjwaney/ Music Producer and Sound Design Supervisor
Khurram Halari/ Electronics and Laser Cutting
Hamza Ahmad/ Mechanics and Augmented Sitaar Design
Ashir Bhatti/Standing Projection Sculpture [Lambda] : Co-designer
Changez Basir/ Standing Projection Sculpture [Lambda] : Fabrication
Country: Pakistan
Medium: Sensory tech, Electronics/ arduinos,, artificial intelligence (AI), generative visuals, sound, and performance
Art Description: ‘Saaz’ invites the audience to think about technology and classical tradition in music. As the digital encroaches further and further into the domain of the physical and the human, can the domain of performance, virtuosity, and the expression of the soul through an instrument remain sacred?
What happens if we build a portal between these two domains?
Bio: Karachi Community Radio (KCR) is an independent online radio archiving and
promoting the contemporary music culture of Pakistan. Their extensive work has seen them
design audio-visual shows, broadcast livestreams and generate virtual productions.
Artist/Collectives: Madyha Leghari
Country: Pakistan
Medium: Interactive Video, proximity sensor
Art Description: “Speaking in Tongues” is an interactive video from the perspective of a woman who awakens one day to find herself trapped in a peaceful summer escape. A reference to the classic Sanskrit poetic form, Sandesha Kavya, she attempts to speak with non-human beings around her: a cloud as an environmental agent, a camera as a machine, and a plant as bio-matter. Viewers step into her character and create their own narrative pathways. The work prompts questions of eco-anxiety, individual agency, an author’s intent, and the ever-presence of the narrator.
Bio: Madyha J. Leghari is an artist, writer, and educator. Her practice often revolves around the possibilities and limitations of language.
Artist/Collectives: Marc Lee
Country: Switzerland
Medium: Real-Time, Geolocation, Web Art, 3 channel Installation
Art Description: In ‘Echolocation’, users can choose any location on a map and move through stories posted on social networks like YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter. Here, these personal impressions are streamed in real time like windows to our changing world. The viewer participates in the social movements of our time and makes a journey into new image and sound collages. Does the flattening of forms and images in the digital world lead to uniformity or can this space be used to expand cultural diversity?
Bio: Marc Lee, a Swiss artist, focuses on real-time processed, computer-programmed audiovisual installations, AR, VR, and mobile apps. Lee critically highlights creative, cultural, social, ecological, and political themes in his work.
Credits: Pro Helvetia
Artist/Collectives: Nobumichi Asai
Collaborators: Minami Otake, Daisuke Tanabe, Tongullman
Country: Japan
Medium: Augmented Reality (AR)
Art Description: ‘my heartbeats’ visualizes invisible violence through the heart,
and makes visible the invisible life force of people.
At first, the suppressed and crushed heart quivers weakly. But with time, the heart recovers and regains a regular beat.
The heart beats, even when oppressed, even when violated. It continues to beat without fear. It does not attack or fight back, but it does not give in to it either.
Bio: Nobumichi Asai pushes for innovation through the fusion of art/design thinking and technology. A media artist, he is internationally known for his face-mapping of Lady Gaga at the Grammy Awards.
Artist/Collectives: PluginHUMAN with Lorraine Brigdale
Dr. Betty Sargeant, Justin Dwyer
Collaborator: Lorraine Brigdale/Yorta Yorta First Nations
Country: Australia
Medium: 3D, web-based, Printed fabric, DMX lighting, Audio, Electronics
Art Description: ‘Disco Apocalypse’ is an almost unbearable reality. Audiences are invited to question excesses of self-indulgence on the edge of the abyss.
This immersive installation highlights how humans draw on rich environmental and cultural resources for hedonistic pleasure and our unwillingness to fully address climate realities. The disco combines visuals, video art, music, and lighting. The visuals feature First Nations Australian Aboriginal war shields. The Shields are re-imagined by an indigenous artist, as a tool for the protection of the environment and traditional cultures.
Bio: PluginHUMAN uses traditional cultural practices and the medium of light to translate complicated data into meaningful audience experiences. This can include projection mapping, video artworks, and sense-based environments.
Artist/Collectives: Rabeeha Adnan
Country: Pakistan
Medium: Video Projection mapping on mixed-media installation; sound design, light, objects
Art Description: ‘Mukaalmah: We Can’t Both Be Right’ is a musical play performed by instrumental objects sourced from Jamshed Memorial Library. Groups of seemingly identical objects find it hard to communicate with one another much like the norms of human social groups. Similarly, all Abrahamic religions essentially echo the same ideas but find it hard to coexist. Whilst drawing parallels between these, characters in the two subgroups perform through the help of projection mapping, in sync, facilitated by light and sound. Filled with literature from the theosophical society, Jamshed Memorial Library serves as an ideal space to investigate institutional beliefs and the way they limit and affect human relationships.
Bio: Rabeeha Adnan, an interdisciplinary artist, addresses power dynamics within state structures through storytelling. Adnan’s practice involves new media techniques including projection, animation, light installation, and text.
Artist/Collectives: Rashid Rana
Country: Pakistan
Medium: Inject Print on Vinyl, Augmented Reality (AR)
Art Description: ‘It Lies Beyond’ challenges viewer’s perception of what is inside and outside, close and distant, within and without, real and fictional while bridging and dismantling these binaries simultaneously, opening questions of the “nature versus man-made”. An ominous, serene seascape that, on a closer inspection, reveals the heaps of garbage that it is composed of. This matrix of garbage also contains within it the illustrations and paintings of sailing ships. Through these metaphors, this installation refers to the post-renaissance materialist inquiry, the explorations of and expansions to the other worlds, sea-trade, colonization, industrial revolution, consumerism followed by global climate change resulting in various natural calamities like recent floods – all unfolding as various chapters of a saga that begins and ends with waters.
Bio: Rashid Rana is known for his pioneering works in new media art from Pakistan. Notable for conceptual innovation and dramatic visual strategies, Rana depicts the familiar and everyday; encompassing themes such as identity, space-time, and duality. He is the recipient of the 2017 Asia Art Award by the Asia Society (NYC).
Photo Credits: Amna Yaseen
Artist/Collectives: second practice
Fatima Hussain, Abeerah Zahid and Ayesha Kamal Khan
Country: Pakistan
Medium: Web-based, Interactive Map, Video, Sound, drawing
Art Description: Artists, like translators, struggle with the impossibility of translating thoughts, moments, and observations. The process of translation shows the tension between languages and forms. second practice invites artists from 15 locations in the global south to form a chain of translation. A material tied to its location and difficult to translate is translated and passed on from artist to artist. Uncovering the gaps and limits in the process of translation can change the way a material is read by someone.
Bio: second practice is a collaborative research & publishing practice that looks at postcolonial geographies. Participatory ways of sharing knowledge inform their method, subject, and art.
Credits: Living Arts International
Artist: Shezad Dawood
Country: UK
Medium: Virtual Reality (VR)
Art Description: It is 300 years from now, and you are released into an underwater world from ‘The Terrarium’, an experimental lab facility. You travel onward by moving your new tentacles and pincers, journeying past a submerged Paljassaare peninsula and meeting other human-marine hybrids along the connected Baltic/English coastlines. You are suddenly and unexpectedly captured by future human pirates, who have had their genes spliced with animal DNA and are pillaging their former planet. Held captive, you are given one chance to decide your fate.
Bio: Shezad Dawood (London-based) is a multidisciplinary artist who interweaves stories, realities and symbolism architectures and ecologies to create richly layered artworks, spanning painting, textiles, sculpture, film and digital media. Fascinated by ecologies and architecture, his work takes a philosophical approach, asking questions and exploring alternative futures through a collaborative, research-driven process.
Credits: British Council, featuring parts of Anthropocene Island TAB17 by ecoLogicStudio and
excerpts of The Terrarium Inventory by Graham Fitkin. Commissioned by UP Projects for
Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021 and Kai Art Center, supported by CUPIDO, a project co-
funded by the European Union, Arts Council England and Tallinn Culture Department.
Artist: Syeda Sheeza Ali
Country: Pakistan
Medium: Iron, Magnet, Sensors
Art Description: ‘Lines of Force’ plays with natural forces and the scientific phenomena that evolve around them. Unseen forces spontaneously interact through mechanisms and structures such as gravitational force, magnetic force, and electromagnetic force. The artwork becomes a manipulation and expression of these dynamics. Through the participation of the viewer, many of the works can be disturbed and reformed.
Bio: Syeda Sheeza Ali, a visual artist, works on the amalgamation of Art and Science. Her artworks have an exciting kinetic experience. She uses Iron and Magnets as her working medium.
Artist: Solimán López
Country: Spain
Medium: Kinetic Sculpture, Cryptocurrency, blockchain, LED Screens, Olive Oil, Air compressor
Art Description: ‘Airdrop Olea’ connects the oldest economy of humanity, agriculture, with the newest, digital currency. Oil, once used as a bargaining chip, as liquid gold, as a gift, and as an engine of friction, is now updated and becomes its own cryptocurrency, connecting disadvantaged farming communities with an ecosystem that without The OLEA project would have been far away. In OLEA, laboratory-created DNA molecules include in their sequence the correspondence of the digital file (smart contract) and function as a biological “hard disk” which in turn has been inserted into olive oil.
OLEA pushes the viewer to consider alternative, advanced, and equal ways of organizing the economic system.
Bio: Soliman Lopez, a technology artist, is the founder of the Harddiskmuseum, OLEA bio-cryptocurrency, and the DNA-based digital entities INTRONS. Lopez researches digital material, preserving data, biology, and blockchain technologies to shape his art.
Credits: Embassy of Spain, Instituto Espronceda from Barcelona, ESAT Valencia, CSIC
and Instituto de la Grasa de Sevilla/ Spain
Artist: Yasir Darya
Collaborators: Sophia Hasnain/Linked things
Country: Pakistan
Medium: Air Bike, installation e-bike and IoT, Live Video, Geolocation
Art Description: ‘Air Rider’ allows users to experience data on air pollution through a live performance. Here, tech meets society, culture, and livability. In real-time, the user connects with streaming live-data and interacts with the ‘Air Rider’, making their way on distinct geographic routes throughout the city.
Bio: Yasir Darya (Karachi-based), founder of Darya Lab and Green Pakistan Coalition, a nature advocacy network, is a multi-disciplinary artist, activist, and futurist. Many of his artworks are based on Karachi’s ecology. His favorite occupation is to redefine a tech or device for another purpose.
Credits: V-Lektra/Bike