Founded by Natasha Jozi in 2017, House emerged from a desire to create a dedicated space for performance art in Pakistan after her return from completing an MFA in Performance Art at Montclair School of the Arts, USA, in 2014. Recognising the absence of sustained discourse, critical engagement, and institutional support for the medium, she envisioned House as a platform where performance art could be explored with the same seriousness as any other contemporary art practice.

At a time when performance art largely existed on the margins of Pakistan’s art landscape, House played a pioneering role in fostering an active culture around the medium through exhibitions, performances, workshops, research, publications, and public programming. By bringing artists, audiences, and practitioners into dialogue, it contributed to repositioning performance art from a peripheral practice to one that increasingly occupied a central place within contemporary artistic discourse in Pakistan.

Over several years, House worked with artists and creative practitioners to investigate performance and its capacity to create and transform the body. Through projects such as Body Becoming and numerous other initiatives, House sought to generate new perspectives on artistic practice while situating art beyond conventional exhibition spaces. Central to its vision was the relationship between body and city, encouraging participants to engage authentically with both and to consider performance as a lived, embodied experience.

Until relatively recently, the broader history and traditions of performance art had remained largely unfamiliar in Pakistan. The medium was frequently conflated with theatre and understood primarily as spectacle to be observed rather than as an experiential, conceptual, and embodied artistic practice. Such perceptions left little room for performance art to develop on its own terms or to explore its emotional, material, participatory, and relational dimensions.

In response, House brought together emerging artists and practitioners from diverse backgrounds who were experimenting with a wide range of ideas and approaches to performance. Rather than reinforcing conventional notions of theatrical performance, House encouraged artists to investigate the body’s capacities, limitations, materiality, endurance, temporality, relationships with other bodies, and the shifting meanings it acquires within different social and political contexts.

The various projects developed under House reflected an intersection of diverse methodologies and subject matters rooted in the local context while engaging with broader questions surrounding embodiment. Some works addressed universal human experiences, while others examined issues of gender, identity, ethnicity, memory, and lived experience unique to the region. Each artist negotiated the relationship between performer and audience differently—inviting participation, provoking reflection, communicating personal experience, or pursuing deeply internal processes.

Ultimately, House sought to explore the body’s performativity as a means of understanding subjectivity and locating that subjectivity within everyday lived reality. Through its sustained programme of performances, workshops, publications, discussions, and collaborative projects, House established performance art as a critical site for artistic inquiry and public engagement, making a significant contribution to the development of performance art discourse in Pakistan.