LAHORE Four artists participated on Tuesday in talks and performances at Art Speak, an ongoing event of the Lahore Biennale, being held in the provincial capital until March 31.

The Art Speak was held at Alhamra Art Centre, The Mall, featuring four artists Nazia Khan, Salima Hashmi, Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran.

Nazia, in her performance which was a narration of her work, came up with a selection of field notes kept by her since 2007 and covered her decade-long research in Manora Island, the urban landscape of Karachi and its maritime history. The research also covered the time when she lived in and travelled to other cities.

Nazia told the audience that over the years, she had traversed Manora on foot, revisiting the same sites and investigating built structures on the island through a range of media, including drawings, video work and narrative text. The island had become a space for incubation where many ideas had germinated, finding form in different guises and different places. The text/narration opened up the space, narrative and geography of a larger terrain.

Next was the performance by Salima Hashmi, the contemporary art historian who performed a 10-minnute skit, recreating a scene from the 1970s TV shows written by Shoaib Hashmi, Such Gup and Taal Matol. The main idea behind the performance was to connect the skit to modern times and highlight the importance of art in today’s world.

Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran talked about CAMP, a Mumbai-based studio for transdisciplinary media practices concerned with the history and politics of technology and experimental video and audio recordings. CAMP’s work has been exhibited at the 2010 Liverpool Biennial, the 2011 Sharjah Biennial, the 2012 New Museum Triennial, Documenta 13 in Kassel and Kabul, the 2013 edition of the Biennale, the 2014 edition of the Shanghai Biennale, and the 2017 edition of the Skulptur Projekte Münster.

Published in Dawn, March 28th, 2018