Lahore Biennale LB03 “Of Mountains and Seas”

Stolon Press & Simryn Gill. Hustle Culture 2024, still from video.

Lahore Biennale LB03
Of Mountains and Seas
October 5, 2024 – November 8, 2024
lahorebiennale.org

The Lahore Biennale Foundation (LBF) announces Of Mountains and Seas, the third edition of the Biennale, curated by John Tain. LB03 builds on the success of the inaugural Lahore Biennale in March 2018 and the second edition in early 2020, curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, by showcasing groundbreaking contemporary art from around the world centred on the themes of ecologies and sustainable futures. Of Mountains and Seas showcases the convergence of art, environmental awareness, and global collaboration to help imagine alternative futures.

The Biennale invites some sixty artists from over thirty countries to present an array of site-specific exhibits and immersive installations that draw attention to issues caused by environmental degradation, along with illuminating vernacular and indigenous heritage as transformative resources for future sustainability. It explores these themes from the perspectives of Pakistan and the Global South more broadly.

The Lahore Biennale has become a noteworthy platform for contemporary art in the region, showcasing artworks from a range of disciplines and media. Exhibition artworks, many of them new commissions, will be featured across a dozen venues across the city, including UNESCO World Heritage sites: the Lahore Fort in the Walled City that also featured spectacular installations in the first two editions; and the Shalimar Gardens, a treasure of Islamic garden design and hydrology that will be showcased for the first time for the Biennale.

LB03’s gathering of artists from South and Southeast Asia and beyond thus addresses urgent topics in a region that in recent years has seen calamitous floods and degraded environment aggravated by agricultural disasters, urban pollution, and social inequality. These problems, which now cannot be ignored, have long been in gestation. The exhibition will feature contributions by artists that suggest aesthetic, sensorial, conceptual, and collective ways to address such challenges, while also underscoring resonances between the histories of Lahore and Pakistan, with other parts of the world that face similar issues.

Free and open to the public, the Biennale commences on Saturday, 5th October, and will run through Friday, 8th November, complemented by a number of collateral exhibitions and programs scattered all over the city.  During the opening weekend (5th – 7th October), in addition to experiencing the Biennale and other shows, visitors will have the opportunity to partake in a number of special events, including private collection viewings, studio visits, artist talks and programs, live performances, and other cultural events (such as heritage and culinary tours) across the city. The guests will be able to fully enjoy Lahore’s famous hospitality.

For its closing program (2nd – 8th November), the Biennale builds on the solidarity of these parallels by convening a mix of leading and emerging researchers, artists, curators, and other practitioners for the Climate Congress, which under the stewardship of Iftikhar Dadi and John Tain, offers an occasion for South-South conversations around the role of the arts and humanities to meaningfully contribute to wider efforts to build. The Climate Congress is supported by a grant from the Getty Foundation.