The 2nd Karachi Biennale 2019 was kicked off on Friday, 26th October 2019, by the city Mayor Waseem Akhtar.
The first Biennale in 2017 was a great success, as a large number of artists came from across the country and abroad. Its main functions were held in NJV’ School’s historical building at the main M. A. Jinnah Road, but other venues in the old town areas received a lot of visitors from art lovers.
This year’s theme is ‘Flight Interrupted: Eco-leaks from the Invasion Desk’, which invokes the loss of flying bird species, wiped out from the city by the mushrooming of vertical structures that broke their free flight and marginalized life cycles. The theme also focuses on ecology and addresses not only transgressive urbanization, which causes the ungreening of Karachi with increasing heat waves during summers, but also shares the global environmental crisis and challenges of climate change.
This year, the event is being held at 7 venues, which are divided into 3 clusters. Cluster 1 comprises Karachi Zoo and VM Gallery; Cluster 1 contains Frere Hall, NED University City Campus, and Mahvash and Jahangir Siddiqui Art at Alliance Francaise (Clifton), and the 3rd Cluster has two venues at Indus Valley School (IVS) Gallery and Bagh Ibne Qasim.
On Sunday, Oct. 27, some personnel of the secret agencies stopped an exhibition of art depicting the extrajudicial killings of 444 people in Karachi by notorious police officer Rao Anwar Ahmed. The KMC Director of Parks thrashed and then stopped a press conference by the organizers of that exhibition, including artist Adeela Suleman and social activist Jibran Nasir. Details of the ugly scene are reported in the key newspapers. For further reading, please click on this news in Daily Dawn.
The events of Biennale 2019 included keynotes, interactive sessions for children, exhibitions, performances, and tours for schoolchildren. The organizers have developed an App for cell phones which can be downloaded from Google Play for Android users and App Store for Apple iPhone users for an events guide.
About Karachi Biennale Trust:
The Karachi Biennale Trust (KBT) was founded in 2016, by a group of visual art professionals and educators as a dynamic platform to promote creativity, innovation, and criticality in the visual arts. KBT, a not-for-profit organization- has remained a citizens’ initiative supported by the corporate sector. It works closely with a network of local and international cultural, educational, and philanthropic organizations.
Karachi Biennale (KB) is the flagship project of the KBT that has been designed to use art as a vehicle to discover, discuss, and respond to Karachi. Each iteration has a theme that is relevant to the host city; in 2017, the first KB, artists were invited to respond to the theme ‘WITNESS.’