KB 2017 - Pakistan’s first and very own

“We’ve put this together with love and scotch tape;” was how Amin Gulgee, Chief Curator of the Karachi Biennale (KB17), described the process of making Pakistan’s first biennale and the country’s largest contemporary art event a reality.

Although this model of exhibiting has over 100 iterations worldwide, the contemporary Biennale has its origins in Venice. In 1893, under the leadership of its mayor, Riccardo Selvatico, the Venetian City Council passed a resolution to set up a biennial, public exhibition of Italian art where artists would be called on to participate by invitation and where a section of the exhibition space was to be reserved for foreign artists. In 1895 the inaugural Venice Biennale opened to great public acclaim. While most biennales are collaborations between the governments and art communities of cities, KB17 was conceived, nourished and brought to fruition by private citizens, all of whom worked on a voluntary basis.

 

First considered in 2015 amidst a Karachi that was rife with instability and sectarian violence, the ravaged, resilient city acted as impetus and KB17 was conceptualised. Under the leadership of Niilofur Farrukh, founding editor of Nukta Art Magazine, member of the International Art Critics Association and founder of the ASNA Clay Triennial, the Karachi Biennale Trust was formed with Niilofur functioning as CEO. Acclaimed artist-curator and trustee Amin Gulgee was Chief Curator. To counter the intolerance that dominated conversations in the city, the trustees agreed that the biennale would be public and free of charge and spread out throughout the city, in keeping with their ethos of inclusivity and goal of reclaiming ownership, and that ‘Witness’ would be the central theme that the KB17 team. Ultimately, it was hoped, Karachi would respond to art’s role as a barometer – and sometimes engine – of social change.

KB17 opened on Saturday 21st October at the Narayan Jagannath Vaidya High School (NJV), and is winningly theatrical in its use of 12 locations. The NJV School was established in 1855, making it Sindh’s first government school. It was known for having students from various social, religious and political backgrounds. Apart from its integral role as an educational institute,the school was also the seat of the first National Assembly of Pakistan in August 1947. Other locations include Frere Hall, home to one of Sadequain’s most iconic mural; Claremont House, the 19th-century Ghizri limestone structure and heritage site; 63 Commissariat, a turn-of-the-century family home that later functioned as a milk factory and then a manufacturing plant for Glacier Mineral Water, and whose eccentric baby-blue facade and large windows evince nostalgia. Capri Cinema, one of the original single-screen cinemas in Pakistan; and Pioneer Bookshop, established in 1948, are also venues. The Alliance Francaise Gallery, a site of interdisciplinary discourse and contemporary art spaces in the city; the VM Art Gallery; and the Foundation of Museum of Modern Art (FOMMA), as well as two of the city’s art schools, The Karachi School of Art (KSA) and The Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS), have lent their support by providing their galleries as venues. The use of living spaces that are of historical value and service to the city is a decision made poetic when observing the provenance of the 12th and final location: the Jamshed Memorial Hall. Located on M.A Jinnah Road and named after Jamshed Nusserwanjee, the philanthropist and humanitarian who was Karachi’s first mayor, the Jamshed Memorial Hall housed the Karachi branch of the Theosophical Society, founded in 1896. Today, the building lends itself to a Montessori school, a lecture room, and two libraries, one of which is amongst the city’s oldest.

KB17 featured over 160 artists, more than 60 of whom are international

The venues, paired with the impressive physical scale and meticulous online archive of the biennale, are made all the more punctilious when one considers the shoe-string budget that the team was working with. Helmed by Amin, the curatorial team (Curator at Large Zarmeene Shah, Assistant Curators Zeerak Ahmed, Sara Pagganwala and Humayun Memon, and Curatorial Team Member Adam Fahy-Majeed) curated two-dimensional and three-dimensional works, installation pieces and performances by over 160 artists, more than 60 of whom are international. Adding to this list were three guest curators. The first guest curator, Carlos Acero Ruiz, is a Dominican visual artist, art critic, curator and professor. He curated works by nine Latin American artists and also worked closely with the KB17 Discursive Committee on the South-South Critical Dialogue – a study group and discursive session on how colonialism and globalism have affected artists and the countries of South America and South Asia. The second, Paolo De Grandis, is an Italian contemporary art curator and President of PDG Arte and has served in the capacity of organiser, commissioner and curator of the Venice Biennale, bringing international artists, including Michelangelo Pistoletto and Yoko Ono to Karachi. Lastly, there is SPARCK (Space for Pan-African Research, Creation and Knowledge) run by Kadiatou Diallo and Dominique Malaquais.

The work featured is as diverse as it is overwhelming, with the entire structure operating as an extensive pop-up museum of contemporary art. A stand-out piece that really engaged with the theme and the city were Althea Thauberger’s film on Capri cinema that focused on the architecture of the space as well as the security modifications that the cinema underwent as time passed and its surrounding environment grew hostile. This, being a visual documentation of the unavoidable, physical change to a place that sells escapism, was poignant. Politics percolate in the film’s evocations of social class, patron and function. Also striking was Adeel uz Zafar’s installation, ‘Tombstones/Katbay’ which he created along with Noman Siddiqui and Hasnain Ali Noonari, that explores and exposes the multitude of geographic, ethnic, religious and socio-economic divides within the city by observing the silent testimony of tombstones in Karachi. Zafar documented tombstones in 182 graveyards and then transposed select cenotaphic inscriptions onto cardboard lightboxes, simultaneously witnessing and giving life to an assemblage of engraved voices. The installation of these light boxes in what was now an exhibiting venue brought into question and made arbitrary the concept of divisions in a space; if life and death could coexist, so could opposing factions in the city.

The show projects the art world as a safe space for the seemingly contrary to coexist. The question arises whether this heralds a reality or a utopia

Performance art has not traditionally been prioritised in the Pakistani art vernacular and KB17 made an effort to counter this by making performance central to the the biennale, providing exciting, intuitive, at times jarring performances. Most notable were Tazeen Qayyum’s ‘Unvoiced’, an “inward expression of meaningful reconciliation and endless compassion” according to the artist, that saw her drag her seated form round a square panel, forming a circle of calligraphy, repetition, and penance around her. If Qayyum’s performance was self reflective, more conspicuous was Miro Craemer’s OVERxCOME – a vibrant, choreographed installation-performance that capered in the in-between. Between bodies, borders, surfaces, and materials, with decisive, orchestrated movement at the centre, featuring German and Pakistani actors, musicians and artists.

The goal of KB17 was to get artists and the city of Karachi to engage with one another in a very public and honest way, but it was also used as a means to bring different groups to the table – visual art was just one piece of the puzzle. Throughout 2017, KB17 has organised a number of roundtable conferences, discursive sessions and outreach programs that target engagement with specific groups and bring them together. Roundtable conferences brought together the city’s various intellectuals. The discursive sessions with leading art academics and critics like Dr Marcella Sirhandi, an expert on Chugtai, and Berlin-based art critic Ingo Arend intrude evidence of real-time context on putatively timeless art and provide a new narrative, one that demands of its audience to witness and then take collective ownership of the space they collectively inhabit.

The show projects the art world as a safe space for the seemingly contrary to coexist. The question arises whether this heralds a reality or a utopia. The answer, at least within the cultural ambit of the biennale, is both.

KB17 continues until the 5th of November.