زندگی مزاحمت ہے Life is Resistance

Offsite exhibition at IVS Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan.

Gallery open 11am – 7pm, Monday – Saturday.

Exhibition opens: Tuesday 20 February 2024, 4-7pm.

This exhibition is a culmination of a year-long journey within the framework of Belonging/Disbelonging – a two-year collaboration between The New Art Gallery Walsall and IVS Gallery. This project connects practices and facilitates conversations across communities in Karachi and West Midlands with a focus on care, inclusivity and kindness. 

Works by Asad Ali Zulfiqar, Layl Ali, Rayhan Muqadam, Rumisa Lakhani and Zahabia Khozema. Organised by Aziz Sohail with Abeeha Hussain and Deborah Robinson.

Over the last year, our cohort of artists in Karachi have been honouring process to research and further develop their practice across a range of interests and mediums. This exhibition weaves together site-specific installations, film and animation, photographs and performance archives, paintings and drawings, maps and diagrams, and zines and publications to activate conversations and narratives around displacement and housing, feminist histories and storytelling, trans activism and organising, family and community, mental health, love and intimacy.

As the artists note ‘life holds the capacity for growth, change, choice, and reproduction. In this last year, we ventured into the personal, political, public, private, worldly, and otherworldly aspects of life, entangled within forces of oppression, against which we made our own lives possible through community and belonging.

Resistance erupts and emerges in the mundane and in times of urgency. Its relationship with life is inextricable, in continual struggle and yet working in tandem with it. Resistance, much like life, reveals itself in varied shades—sometimes subtle, sometimes resounding. It speaks to the individual and the collective, it blurs the lines between the private and the public, and its influence extends from the local to the global. We see a unifying thread in our works and our time spent together over the course of this residency: an undeniable, imperative sensitivity to the diverse forms of resistance against oppression. We honour the value and interconnectedness of resistance and its capacity to manifest change and transformation.’

Works by Asad Ali Zulfiqar, Layl Ali, Rayhan Muqadam, Rumisa Lakhani and Zahabia Khozema. Organised by Aziz Sohail with Abeeha Hussain and Deborah Robinson.

Belonging/Disbelonging is funded by the British Council International Collaboration Grants, which are designed to support the UK and overseas organisations to collaborate on international art projects.