Two years in the making, Karachi Biennale17 (KB) finally goes full swing as the country’s first art biennale. For art world outsiders here, the significance and attention surrounding a biennale may be difficult to understand as they still visualise art in a highbrow gallery context or as a bewildering and difficult to comprehend subject. Today in a shrinking globalised world biennales represent a mobilisation of art and visitors — they are a feel-good moment for cities to connect to a wider network. More than a hundred biennales have mushroomed across the globe in the last two decades. This has spawned a culture which has become vital for the conception and production of contemporary art.

Specifically conceived to reect recent developments in art scenes and contexts, biennales provide freedom for artists to engage with changing social, political and cultural realities, beyond the constraints of traditional museum and gallery exhibition models. They are also opening up new public spaces for artistic production outside the dominant market.

Another reason why biennales are successful, and on the increase, is that this exhibition model is extremely adaptable. There is a long tradition of biennales under the umbrella of institutions or art museums, such as the museum-based Whitney Biennial organised by the Whitney Museum of American Art since 1937. Some are organised thematically around the particular medium which it features, as in the International Print Triennial Kraków, for example. A third format is the city-based event, in which the name of the host city occupies a prominent position in the exhibition’s title, such as the Shanghai Biennale or Istanbul Biennale.

KB17 has energised the art literate but will its creativity attract the reluctant viewers and tempt them to engage with the biennale phenomenon?

The biennale in Karachi, KB17 is a city-centred event. Its CEO Niilofur Farrukh has invited the public to come and “witness our city — over 22 million strong and sprawling — through the lens of art”. Explaining that the biennale “will draw art out of the gallery and into the spaces that express Karachi’s quotidian pulse”, she points out that the art by over 140 artists from Pakistan and across the globe responds to a common theme. ‘Witness’ [the theme chosen] for its strong relevance to politics of representation, erasure and selective documentation.” The public exhibitions, performances and screenings, dialogues and extensive visitor programmes are being hosted at 12 diverse venues: schools, heritage sites, cinemas, and public parks. Other than visual artists, curator Amin Gulgee has also invited architects, filmmakers, photographers and professionals engaged with fashion and theatre into this discourse because as he says, “This cross-disciplinary approach reflects the ethos of Karachi in which there is a great deal of interaction and collaboration among creative communities.”

In a city where art is mainly confined to galleries and art colleges only, new notions of publicness in art in the KB17 format merit consideration. The KB 17’s most extensive event was a year-long public art project, ‘Reel on Hai’ which was initiated in June 2016 and aimed at reclaiming and reworking discarded cable reels into art objects. A hundred artists, designers, and architects worked on-site in parks, schools, hospitals, colleges, and other public places to engage communities through activities designed around the work, and sensitise them to art and the role it plays in projecting the dynamism of a people.

Familiar but forgotten public venues such as Commissariat, Claremont House and Jamshed Memorial House have been reinvented by KB17 as exhibition and dialogue spaces. Stoking history, this reuse prompts fresh appraisals of timeworn structures. The venue of a discursive panel KB17 held earlier this year, “The Algebra of Memory: A Dialogue with Emerging Artists, Poets, and Writers” was at the Pioneer Book House in Saddar.

The main venue of KB17, the 160-year old NJV School building located within the historical precincts of one of the oldest and most populous parts of the city, had initially housed the very first Constituent Assembly before the school was moved to this building.

Penetrating Karachi’s bastis and mohallas well before the official inauguration of the biennale through workshops and outreach projects such as ‘Sparking minds: KB17 Educational Programme’ to enlighten small segments of schoolchildren about the oft asked question, “art ka maqsad kiya hai” [what is the purpose of art]was a move in the right direction. A baby step towards resolving the ‘disconnect’ between the public and contemporary art in cities like Karachi.

Today biennales have become the major means through which local art worlds regionalise and internationalise themselves. The two-week long KB17 has energised the art literate. But will this wave of creativity draw out the indifferent, the art shy or the reluctant viewers and tempt them to engage and connect to the idea of ‘Witness’ and the Biennale phenomenon at large? That is a moot question.

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 29th, 2017