The Lahore Biennale 02, titled “between the sun and the moon” is curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, Director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, and features more than 20 new commissions and other works by over 70 participating international artists. The Lahore Biennale 02 (LB02) focuses on the Global South, where climate change plays an increasing role in the social situation of the region. In order to raise awareness of this issue, LB02 responds to Lahore’s cultural and ecological history, while exploring human relationships with the environment and revisiting traditional understandings of the self and their cosmological underpinnings. The LB02 theme takes inspiration from intellectual and cultural exchange between South and West Asia.
LB02 is spread out around various cultural and historical locations in Lahore, including among others Lahore Fort, Lahore Museum, the PIA Planetarium, the Punjab Institute of Language, Art & Culture (PILAC), Tollinton Market, Bradlaugh Hall and Punjab University.
Montréal-based Hajra Waheed is among the 20 artists who made a new commission for LB02. Waheed’s Hum was designed to be experienced while moving between the columns of Diwaan i-Aam in Lahore Fort. The space was built by Shah Jahan in 1628 to receive members of the public to hear their grievances. The work employs humming to explore collective experience, and features eight songs of resistance from South, Central and West Asia and Africa. The collection thus imagines a shared future in spirit and collective agency.
Another new commission at Lahore Fort is The Escape of Anarkali, an outdoor installation by New York-based, Syrian artist Diana Al Hadid. As legend goes, Anarkali, a courtesan in Lahore, had an affair with Crown Prince Jahangir against the wishes of Mughal Emperor Akbar. Because of this, the Emperor had her buried alive between walls where she died. When Jahangir became emperor, he built a mausoleum for Anarkali. The 16th century octagonal monument, known as the Tomb of Anarkali, is today used as the Punjab Archives. Al Hadid expands in her work statement:
I am deeply interested in sites that draw forward the legends or memories of a long dead person whose remains are not present, such that the building or tomb itself becomes a stand-in for a body.
Also at Lahore Fort, Bangladeshi photographer and video artist Munem Wasif presents an existing work, Machine Matters, a video installation from 2017. In the video, a room full of machines seems to breathe in disquieted silence. With subtle movements of the camera, Wasif intrudes upon objects in space with close-ups that transform bodies into sculptural figures. The artist explores the history of jute production, a material that connected Bengal’s peasant smallholders to global capital, and rapidly became the premier packaging material of mid-19th century world trade. With the closing of many jute factories today, and the exploitation of labour rights, the present situation mirrors the past, slowly blurring temporal references.
Syrian artist and photographer Hrair Sarkissian brings at Lahore Fort his Final Flight (2018-2019), partially commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation for the Sharjah Biennial 14 (SB14). The mixed media work explores the story of the Northern Bald Ibis, one of the rarest birds on Earth, and the living descendant of the birds depicted in the Egyptian hieroglyphs. In 1989, the birds were declared extinct from the wild, but in 2002 a surviving colony of seven was discovered in the Syrian desert near Palmyra with help from the local Bedouin population. The tiny colony was intensively studied and protected until the war in Syria broke out. The birds disappeared again around the time Palmyra was destroyed in 2014. The work not only investigates the history of the ibis, but also brings into play the manmade causes of extinction that go beyond pollution, industrial and urban development, to encompass war and conflict in the equation.
At the Mughal-era Mubarak Haveli, Kuwaiti artist Basma Al Sharif presents her video installation We began by measuring distance (2009), a “dark ontological rumination on tragedy, time and space”. The film merges long still frames of life in Gaza, images of nature and fragments of a story in which a group of people seeks to measure distances.
At the same location, but of an opposite nature, is Farah Al Qasimi‘s Umm Al Naar (Mother of Fire) (2019), the artist’s debut feature film that explores notions of gender, place and the body. Made in the style of a fictional reality TV channel, the film features an interview with a mythical jinn (spirit) character named Um Al Naar about her experiences in Ras Al-Khaimah, the UAE’s northernmost emirate. The film is set during the centuries of Portuguese and British colonial rule and examines European influences on the UAE. In this horror-comedy, the jinn’s monologue touches on societal issues in modern-day UAE, and expresses concern with the deteriorating powers of tribal knowledge and spirituality.
At Punjab University, Pakistani lens-based artist Basir Mahmood presents Monument of Arrival and Return. For the 2016 film work, the artist employed a production company in Pakistan to film a group of porters who work at the Lahore railway station. The men, called “coolies” since the British colonial rule era, are easily recognisable for their bright orange uniforms. While they handle personal goods and luggage, the porters are identified only by a number stitched onto the back of their uniforms and often remain invisible to their customers. In the film, the porters move in an enclosed space, removed from their original context, and carry around belongings of the artist, who at the time of filming was absent from the filming location (he was in Amsterdam and co-ordinating from afar). In their moving without going anywhere, the men become symbols of the colonial past and present.
At the same location, Pakistani artists Rabbya Naseer & Hurmat ul Ain’s Distance between you and I changes its form yet again – something the work does with each iteration. The work addresses notions of identity and boundaries, both personal and collective, permeable and impermeable. The work suggests an examination of questions around acts of imposition, freedom of choice, the possibilities of self-expression in public space, and the poetics of intimacy and vulnerability for affect.
Melbourne-based, Iranian artist Hoda Afshar presents Remain (2018) at Tollinton Market. In the work, she addresses invisible histories through Australian border protection and the human rights of asylum seekers. Afshar sheds light on life on the infamous Manus Island, an immigration detention facility in Papua New Guinea. The work was made in collaboration with several men still in detention six or more years after they left their homeland to seek asylum in Australia. Comprising still and moving images, voice recordings and text, Remain bears witness to the dreams, violent realities, boredom and beauty of life – and death – in the camps on Manus Island.
At PILAC, the new commission by Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid explores changes in the environment, by looking more closely at humanity’s multidimensional relationship with animals and nature. Her film was shot in the fertile alluvial plains of the Indus River and its tributaries in the province of Punjab. The work considers the effect of the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent, whilst examining the evolving relationship of locals with waterways.
At the same location, Al Qasimi has decided to re-propose Naiza Khan‘s work seen at the Pakistani Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019, an apt reference to the global climatic changes and their effect on the population, especially in the poorer regions of the Global South.
The variety of works presented in “between the sun and the moon” respond to curator Hoor Al Qasimi‘s message that humanity should come together in an effort to forge a new future on our planet that sees the possibility for a better coexistence among peoples and with nature. Curator of LB02, said:
For centuries, inhabitants of these regions oriented themselves with reference to the sun, the moon, and the constellations. How might we reflect on our place within the cosmos today, at this conjuncture of planetary climate crisis and polarities between societies? LB02 looks upwards with a view to forging new resonances and new imaginings of the future that encompass the full breadth of its material and virtual possibilities, growing from a tradition of intra-regional mobility of ideas, people, flora and fauna.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
Lahore Biennale 02 is on view from 26 January to 29 February 2020 at various locations around Lahore, Pakistan.