STUDIO #7 : The Artist Space in Karachi

A workshop with emerging artists in Karachi, hosted by the Artists Association VASL.

This is where it will happen

And So It Happened brings together four artists in residence, to examine the ways in which memories have assisted in the construction of knowledge, beliefs, desires, values and fantasies. Through their engagement with an unfamiliar space the artists have re-contextualized their individual practices in an alternate framework, approaching it through a new conceptual lens. Thus they launch investigations into the notion of time, space, and the various forms and manifestations of memory – in culture, oral and literary history, inherited identity, communal and societal structures, and the architecture of the city itself. In doing so, they make connections between past and present to examine collective, societal memories, recalling, retracing and giving a renewed presence to the past.

The interaction of time and memory is expressed through explorations of space – personal, temporal, physical, socio-political, imagined and metaphorical – that allows the artists to contextualize, process and resolve personal and/or collective traumas. Conversations around communal marginalization and constructs of social division and othering are instigated and explored through the evolving physical structures of the city, held in communal memory. At the same time, another form of generational trauma and othering is processed and vocalized through the formation of a safe space that emerges from a language of stylization, absurdity and chaos, extracted from an amalgam of theoretical research and memory, which is at once familiar yet isolating in order to create a sense of empathy in the viewer.

The notion of space becomes more palpable in structures where it presents as both subject and medium. Through an intersection of materiality and memory drawing from nostalgia, barriers between people, objects, spaces, and time are broken, fusing them to give birth to infinite new spaces of experience. Notions of nostalgia are dismantled, expanding investigations into borrowed memory and generational experiences in identity formation to look at collective identity and the creation of nationalist rhetoric and twisted notions of masculinity by examining literary historical narrative.

(Text by art writer in residence, Nimra Khan)