ART TALKS: Creating a Biennale for a Fractured City Can art revitalise a city?

Date: April 24, 2025 - Thursday

Time: 16:00

Place: santralistanbul Campus, E4-209

Speaker: Niilofur Farrukh

Niilofur Farrukh

Build bridges with collective memories Karachi Biennale was founded in 2016 as a transformative public art intervention for a city of 24 million.

The presentation will highlight its role over the past decade in addressing critical social concerns while fostering innovation, inclusivity, and dialogue by weaving historical narratives with the complexities of our time. The Biennale also expands the decolonial space where stories of disenfranchisement, hope, struggle, and achievement spark public imagination and invite reflection.

Niilofur Farrukh is a Karachi-based art interventionist whose works are located at the intersection of art criticism, publication, curation, and public art in Pakistan. Primarily motivated by decolonial issues and the convergences between political ideology and visual narrative, her research and writing focus on excavating the interdisciplinary connections that keep getting lost in Pakistan’s tangled cultural and political matrix.

She has three books to her credit and numerous essays for publication. Her most recent publication is A Beautiful Despair - The Art and Life Of Meher Afroz ( Le Topical Printers Pvt Ltd, 2020). The other two are Pioneering Perspectives ( Ferozsons ( Pvt) Ltd, 1998) and Pakistan’s Radioactive Decade: An Informal Cultural History of the 1970s co-edited with Amin Gulgee and John McCarry (Oxford University Press, 2019). In 1999, she co-founded ASNA with its mandate to foster synergies between contemporary art and artisanal practices. This led to co-curating three iterations of the International ASNA Clay Triennial and Kumbhar Melas ( asnaart.com).  Niilofur co-founded NuktaArt, Pakistan’s Contemporary Art Magazine, and was its founding editor for 10 years while it was in print. Her contributions can be found in leading Pakistani and South Asian publications. She was a well-read art columnist for Newsline and Dawn and currently writes a monthly piece for The Karachi Collective, an online platform. Institutions regularly invite her to present papers at forums worldwide, and she has made presentations in Korea, China, Australia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India, Turkey, Sweden, Norway, the UK, Canada, Brazil, and Paraguay.

Niilofur has served two terms as Vice President on the Board of the International Art Critics Association and is the former Chair of the Election and Membership Committee. Currently, she is the Chair of the Censorship and Freedom of Expression Committee. She has been on the jury for the AICA Young Critic Award for two consecutive years.   In 2023, Niilofur was invited to be a jury member for the International Public Art Prize. She was recently appointed for a 5-year term as a member of the Academic Committee of the International Institute of Public Art Prize at Shanghai University. She is a Founder of the Karachi Biennale Trust and served as its Managing Trustee from 2016 to 2025. As the CEO of the Karachi Biennale, Niilofur Farrukh, she was responsible for its four iterations.  (www.karachibiennale.org.pk).