The Karachi Art Summit was inaugurated on Tuesday, which will continue until April 8. The opening ceremony was held at the National Museum, where art lovers met artisans and performers from across the country.
The inaugural’s main attraction was a mesmerising performance by the iconic Amin Gulgee. His performance was called “Play Me”, which is themed around confrontation. It was co-performed by Sara Pagganwala. The performance consisted of cast bronze images of Gulgee’s face, which kept the audience in awe throughout.
The main aim of the Karachi Art Summit is to bring visual art into public spaces to invite, encourage, and even impose public engagement on the audience. Projects will be created to interact with the viewers to create a stage that is autonomous and reachable. In Karachi Art Summit, besides various site-specific installations and sculptures, there are two curatorial projects, more than 80 artists including 34 international artists, three talks and five performances. Artists from other countries are also participating with their curatorial projects. Few artists are travelling from Lahore as well as Hyderabad in order to install their work on the sites. All the sites are outdoors and will encourage public to interact and experience contemporary art.
These venues are mostly main historical buildings of Karachi and are open for general public. Site-specific installations and few monumental pieces of sculpture will engage the public who are not familiar with contemporary art and role of art in general. These majorly crowded public spaces all over Karachi will create a new trend of visiting art galleries and learn to understand art in future.