Daily Times

The Lahore Biennale Foundation is pleased to announce that artistic director Rashid Rana is taking the discussion about the Lahore Biennale 2017 overseas this month.

Rashid Rana will be giving talks at highly eminent institutions, the first one of which took place at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, on Tuesday.

Rana in conversation with Glenn D Lowry at MoMA will focus on Rana’s art practice in general and his curatorial vision for the inaugural Lahore Biennale in particular; post presents is a series of talks devoted to the cross-geographical consideration of modern and contemporary art. The sessions are an extension of post, MoMA’s online platform devoted to art from a global perspective. Several notable personalities from the global art world will attend the talk, such as Hans Ulrich Obrist, Rajeeb and Nadia Samdani, Nicholas and Max Logsdail and Jessica Morgan.

Rana will elaborate upon the different aspects of this ambitious undertaking and will be addressing, amongst other things, the suitability of Lahore as a new and novel context for the biennale owing to its rich artistic and cultural milieu. He will also expound upon how the generic biennale format may be adjusted to suit the unique urban reality of the city. Through this approach, the Lahore Biennale, the flagship event of the foundation, will seek to readdress the city of Lahore and its varying energies, every two years through art.

Rana articulates this desire perfectly when he says, “With the inaugural Lahore Biennale, it is only natural and perhaps even necessary to reflect on the ways in which the format may be used anew in a distinct and meaningful way. This distinction, while informed by the context of the location, is not restricted within it. Rather, the first Lahore Biennale sets out to challenge the parameters of both the format and the discipline of art itself. It seeks to imagine possible futures and potentials in subversive and yet, expansive ways. I hope that starting with a note of self-reflection will become a sustained practice that allows the Lahore Biennale to respond flexibly and urgently to new fields of inquiry for many cycles to come.”

The conversation at MoMA will continue in this vein and further shed light on the scope of the biennale that is set to be the largest contemporary art event in the history of Pakistan.