The opening ceremony for Karachi Art Summit was held at National Museum on 21st March featuring artisans and performers across the country.
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.
The inaugural’s main attraction was a mesmerizing performance by the iconic Amin Gulgee. His performance named ‘Play Me’, which is themed around ‘confrontation’, was co-performed by Sara Pagganwala. The performance consisted of cast bronze images of Gulgee’s face, which kept the audience in awe throughout.
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 in 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.
The sites include National Museum, Art Council, Kothari Parade, State Bank Museum, Commune Artist colony, Fomma Art Trust, Goethe Institut, Alliance Francaise de Karachi, Karachi University, Iqra University, Frere Hall, Quaid-e-Azam House, Free Mason’s Lodge and Mohatta Palace Museum.
These venues are main historical buildings of Karachi and are open for general public. Site-specific installations and few monumental pieces of the sculpture will engage the public who are not familiar with contemporary art and role of art in general.
These majorly crowded public spaces in all over Karachi will create a new trend of visiting art galleries and learn to understand art in future.
The Summit will bring together modernism, distinction and criticality through a multiplicity of curatorial strategies in order to showcase artists from Pakistan to the world while also strengthening a regional art exchange that benefits communities on a larger scale.
Pakistan has begun to feature prominently on the global map with the many ingenious interests that arise with the international accomplishments of its artists. These achievements reflect the depth and vitality of art production in the country that is garnering the attention of the entire world.
