KARACHI – Durriya Kazi is a Karachi-based sculptor whose work reflects her concerns with tradition and change. Her work consists of three dimensional works, drawings and installations.
Focusing on wider audiences and exploring existing art practices outside the colonial legacy of the gallery, she seeks to create sites to voice ‘hidden histories’, attempting to bring coherence to the dispersal and fragmentation common in the wake of imposed cultures of both colonial as well as postcolonial ideologies.
“Seeing art as intervention, my seminal work, the ‘Art Caravan’, set the pattern for exploring issues of collaboration, inclusion, audience, and both making art step outside as well as inviting the ‘outside’ in,” Kazi says.
Her activities as an artist, art educator and participant in all aspects of the art debate focus on discovering firm ground for authentic art practice. An important aspect of this has been a number of public art projects that link contemporary art concerns with popular urban art practices.
Seeing art less as object and more as experience or intervention, Kazi’s aim is to bring art away from the periphery to a more central place in society. “In my role as an art educator, I have similarly engaged in locating art education in the cultural context of Pakistan without compromising its international role,” she explains.
The artist established a Visual Studies Department at the University of Karachi in 1999, and the department’s underlying philosophy is to bring traditional and contemporary practices on equal footing. She has also researched traditional and popular arts and presented papers on these subjects.
