The LBF website describes the Virtual Museum is as a platform for artists, creative practitioners and visitors to create projects that investigate their shared cultural heritage and the legacies of creative practice that have emerged from it.
The project is a part of the British Council's Pakistan-UK Season: New Perspectives programme to mark the 75th anniversary of Pakistan, and the opening event was attended by many senior officials from the Council, as well as officials from the British High Commission.
Questioning the role of 'traditional forms of museum making', the project transcends physical boundaries and utilizes the virtual space as a legitimate form of cultural curation and historiography.
A diverse group of creators, curators and collaborators form this years Virtual Museum. Speakers such as academic Ali Usman Qasmi, filmmaker Sarmad Sultan Khoosat and artist Masooma Syed all make the project vibrant and diverse. The virtual curations are displayed in NCA.
The curators and themes for the project are Dastaan-I-Urdu, curated by Ali Usman Qasmi (Co Curator: Mahmood Ul Hasan); The Body and Beyond: Women’s Movements in Pakistan, curated by Farida Batool; Taos Chaman – Post-Colonial Identity in Artistic Practices in South Asia, curated by Masooma Syed; Manduva: Exploring What We Won’t Like to Call ‘Lollywood’, curated by Sarmad Sultan Khoosat; Ilm-e-Mosiqui: Classical Legacies, Folk Music and Contemporary Classics, curated by Sarah Zaman and Architecture through Space and Time: Conversations with the first generation of Pakistani Architects, curated by Tanvir Hasan. All these themes respond to a different aspect of our country’s shared history, cultural language and artistic legacy.