House Artist Residency (HAR)
The House Artist Residency (HAR) was launched in 2017 as part of House’s ongoing commitment to supporting experimental performance practices and expanding artistic discourse in Pakistan. Conceived as an intensive programme of research, collaboration, and embodied experimentation, HAR brought together artists from diverse disciplines to investigate the performativity of the body and its relationship to the urban environment.
The inaugural residency consisted of three workshops, each spanning three days, during which participants explored everyday life in Lahore through experiential exercises, collective discussions, and exploratory walks across the city. The residency encouraged artists to move beyond established social conventions and disciplinary boundaries, cultivating trust in the encounters between familiar and unfamiliar bodies within shared public spaces.
Participants approached performance as a communicative act, a staging of shifting identities, a mode of storytelling, and a collaborative process grounded in lived encounters. Through these investigations, they reconsidered the relationships between public and private space, body and environment, and body and artistic medium. By engaging with a wide range of sites—crowded and secluded, abandoned and inhabited, imagined and overlooked, formal and informal—the residency invited artists to develop new forms of interaction with both the city and its communities.
Rather than treating the city as a backdrop, HAR positioned Lahore as an active collaborator in the creative process. The residency culminated in a series of site-responsive performances that participants either performed themselves or facilitated within the urban landscape, testing new ways of engaging audiences and public space.
Although the structure of each workshop remained consistent, the themes, methodologies, and artistic outcomes evolved in response to the dynamics of each cohort, the conversations that emerged, and the spaces they inhabited. At the core of every iteration was an inquiry into the role of the body within the complex social, political, and cultural realities of the South Asian city. Through HAR, House established a sustained platform for experimentation, embodied research, and interdisciplinary exchange, contributing to the continued development of performance art practice in Pakistan.
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