Making Events, Managing Institutions

Workshop with Noor Ahmed, saeed husain, and Kylie Gilchrist

Art and ethnographic displays are temporally stretched between “events” (Meinert and Kapferer, 2015) such as biennales and national pavilions, and institutionalized venues such as national museums and art galleries.

In Pakistan, the former is a high-performance enterprise where global conversations are tapped into, whereas the latter is a sluggish monolith where exhibits remain untouched for decades. In moving between a biennale and a national museum, how does a public approach both kinds of displays, and which public attends either display? How does the existence of one garner “high-tech” approaches, whereas the other needs “saving”? How do artists find themselves in either space? We explore these questions through ideas of art and governance, the setting of the art event and institution itself, and practices that force both spaces to interact.

In this workshop Noor, saeed, and Kylie present case studies from their projects and invite participants to develop approaches that examine the relationship(s) between events and institutions, artists and publics, and innovation and institutional inertia.

Reading list for the event to follow shortly.

Coffee and tea will be provided in the morning and afternoon.

Bios

Kylie Gilchrist

Kylie Gilchrist’s research focuses on artistic and technical avant-gardes and their interactions with evolving mechanisms of social control amidst twentieth-century processes of decolonization and globalization. As a current postdoc at IKK, University of Copenhagen, her project examines how 1960–70s artists incorporated the epistemological revolutions of modern science to decentre dominant frameworks of knowledge. She previously completed a PhD at the University of Manchester comprising a monographic study of Karachi-born, London-based artist Rasheed Araeen’s practice between the 1950s and 1970s.

Saeed husain

Saeed husain is an anthropologist whose work examines urban life, migration, and cultural histories in Southasia, who has led major curatorial and digital initiatives. His writing has been widely published in leading news outlets, and his work bridges academic inquiry and public writing to bring historical and anthropological insight into current debates.

Noor Ahmed

Noor Ahmed is the curator of Karachi Biennale 2027. She is co-curator of River Landscapes, a project between South Asia and Europe, that creates a transdisciplinary glossary of water. In 2021 she was part of the team curating the Pakistan Pavilion at Dubai Expo 2020, which won a silver award amongst 192 countries at the World Expo. She was Project Director/Lead Curator of the ‘Digital Curation of Lahore and Taxila Museums’, Pakistan's largest museum digitisation project, that was supported by the World Bank and executed by the Government of Punjab, and The Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP). From 2022-2025 she was also heading CAP, one of the most robust digital archives in South Asia.

Registration

Please sign up via email to pass@hum.ku.dk - there are a limited number of seats. Participation is free.