House Artist Residency (HAR)
The House Artist Residency (HAR) 2018 was implemented to support experimental modes of performance and open up new pathways in artistic discourse in Pakistan. HAR 2018, a set of three workshops, each spanning three days, was designed to allow artists from all disciplines to explore the performativity of their environment and body in everyday life in Lahore. Experiential workshops, discussion sessions, and exploratory walks through the city allowed participants to break away from the boundaries of social convention, providing them with an opportunity to begin trusting the relationships between familiar and foreign bodies in a shared space.
Participants explored performance as a communicative action, staging of shifting identities, a means of storytelling, and a collaboration within encounters. These activities paved the way for participants to think of their environment in unique ways, experiencing how the line between public and private, body and its surroundings, and body and medium could be blurred. This allowed them to enter public spaces in the city with these boundaries already broken and new avenues for interaction possible. Through replicating these activities in all sorts of spaces—crowded, secluded, abandoned, imagined, ignored, lived, subaltern, and so on—the artists connected with the people and the city. The workshops culminated in a set of performances which participants either performed themselves or orchestrated within the city.
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While the format of each of these workshops remained largely consistent, the themes and approaches of participants towards performances varied and shifted according to group dynamics, conversations, and relative spaces of activity. The common thread was the role of the body in our multifaceted South Asian urban context.
House Artist Residency I – Lahore 2018
HAR 2018 – 01 worked largely with the external space – the material, the visual, the tactile, the audible, and the communicative. The participants focused on relationships between body and environment; tackling issues such as gender performativity, public spectacle vs public shame, and common symbolic language. Several performances involved interventions in public spaces, either observing reactions of the audience or attempting to invoke responses from them.
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House Artist Residency II – Lahore 2017
Performances from HAR 2018 – 02 workshop were intimate and personal. Many performances tackled personal struggles of artists relating to identity, comfort/discomfort, insecurity and trust. Artists used their bodies as a means to explore negotiations of power in the contexts of their own lives, and brought those into the public sphere. They focused aspects such as the image of powerlessness/powerfulness, security/insecurity, and how it changes meanings and forms in public spaces, or amongst strangers.
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House Artist Residency III – Lahore 2018
Participants of HAR 2018 – 03 picked themes and subject matters with deep personal meaning, which simultaneously corresponded with overarching broader social issues. Artists blended social and personal experiences, placing highly intimate struggles in the context of political, urban, national, ethnic, or gendered experiences.
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