Talking Circle (بے خبرہوٹل) presents:
You're Killing The Mountain: Discussion on the six projects on WATER & TERRAINS of Muree
Speakers (Artists):
Asif Khan
Fazal Rizvi
Shahana Rajani
Zahra Malkani
Saba Khan (Moderator)
The discussion will revolve around the Murree Museum Artist Residency Foundation's 2017 residency. This included two thematic residencies on 'Water' and 'Terrains' of Murree. While these issues are transnational South Asian environmental concerns, Murree becomes a microcosm to study these disasters. Each artist during the residency period had the freedom to interpret the themes through their personal studio practices, which are to be compiled into an artistic book. The book becomes a project/art work accessible to larger audiences, instead of a body of work only to be viewed within the confines of a white-cube setting for a short period of time. The artists engaged with the community of Murree through drawing workshops for Gujjar, gypsy children and held an exhibition in a public space for the tourists of Murree. The program was supplemented with notable visiting mentors who made studio visits, discussions and talks. Murree Museum Artist Residency becomes a space to meet, discuss, think and collaborate with other artists and practitioners from across the country.
About the Speakers:
Saba Khan lives and works in Lahore. Khan’s work is pumped with humor and satire; it studies the social class divides through layers of local aesthetics. Glitter, paint and crystals are used as tropes to comment on the emerging affluent-class, along with the ‘bad-tastes’ exhibited through religious ceremonies, homes and the bazaar. The works also make acerbic commentary on political and social conditions with inside-jokes and symbols while not preaching on a particular stance. Khan founded Murree Museum Artist Residency in 2014, an artist-run-initiative that works as a support structure for practitioners within Pakistan and beyond. Since its inception, she has curated five residencies and one artistic book.
Asif Khan is a photographer and a photography department technician at Beaconhouse University. He has worked on several projects with eminent artists. Recently he showed at 1x1 Gallery, Dubai in a show curated by Salima Hashmi. He is also working on archiving the work of the eminent, deceased artist, Zahoor-ul-Ikhlaq. His own work is on the sublime landscape.
Fazal Rizvi is an interdisciplinary artist with a practice that explores notions of memory, loss, erasures, migration, post-colonial identity etc. Rizvi graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2010. He was selected for the Arcus Project Residency, Japan, in 2011 and was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust and British Council Residency at Gasworks, London, 2014, and was part of the Vasl International Artist Residency 2015 as the Art Writer in Residence. He is currently a core member of the Tentative Collective and works and teaches at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi.
Shahana Rajani is an artist and writer based in Karachi. Her recent work explores the politics of development and displacement in the city using interdisciplinary methods and media. She is a co-founder of the Karachi LaJamia and currently teaches at the Social Sciences Department, Institute of Business Administration.
Zahra Malkani is an artist based in Karachi. She works across multiple media and draws upon feminist, decolonial, anticapitalist traditions. She is a co-founder of the Karachi LaJamia, an experimental pedagogical project seeking to politicise art education and explore new radical pedagogies and art practices, and she is currently a lecturer at Habib University.
Join a few of the artists and researchers involved in this residency, as they share their experiences and enlighten us on the issues they unpacked during their stay in Murree