House Artist Residency IV (2018) – Lahore
The fourth iteration of the House Artist Residency (HAR IV) was hosted at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, as part of House’s continued commitment to nurturing experimental approaches to performance art and supporting emerging practitioners in Pakistan. The residency provided a space for students to investigate the body as a site of artistic inquiry, using performance to explore personal experiences, social structures, and embodied realities.
Through a process of experimentation, discussion, and critical engagement, participants developed works that examined themes of endurance, identity, control, and chaos. The performances explored the physical and psychological capacities of the body, questioning how individuals navigate systems of discipline, uncertainty, expectation, and transformation.
Students approached performance as a means of negotiating their relationship with themselves, others, and the environments they inhabit. Their works investigated the limits of the body, the construction and performance of identity, and the tensions between order and disorder. Through actions, gestures, and temporal experiences, participants transformed personal concerns into collective encounters, creating performances that challenged conventional ways of understanding the body and its agency.
HAR IV continued House’s ongoing exploration of performance as a critical and experiential practice, encouraging young artists to move beyond traditional modes of representation and engage with the body as both a medium and a subject. By fostering experimentation and dialogue within an educational context, the residency contributed to the development of new voices in Pakistan’s evolving performance art landscape.
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