Of Mountains and Seas

The Lahore Biennale Foundation (LBF) announces Of Mountains and Seas, the third edition of the Biennale, curated by John Tain. LB03 builds on the success of the inaugural Lahore Biennale in March 2018 and the second edition in early 2020, curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, by showcasing groundbreaking contemporary art from around the world centered on the themes of ecologies and sustainable futures. Of Mountains and Seas showcases the convergence of art, environmental awareness, and global collaboration to help imagine alternative futures.

The Biennale invites sixty-some artists representing thirty countries to present an array of site-specific exhibits and immersive installations that draw attention to issues caused by environmental degradation, along with illuminating vernacular and indigenous heritage as transformative resources for future sustainability. It explores these themes from the perspectives of Pakistan and the Global South more broadly.

Exhibition artworks, many of them new commissions, will be featured across a dozen venues across the city, including the UNESCO World Heritage site the Lahore Fort in the Walled City, which also featured spectacular installations in the first two editions, and the Shalimar Gardens, a true treasure of Islamic garden design and hydrology that will be showcased for the first time for the Biennale.  By placing historic sites in dialogue with more contemporary works, LB03 brings to light the ways the city’s celebrated culture, architecture, and gardens, generally understood to symbolize its palimpsest of connections to Asia and Europe through trade routes and the migration of people and knowledge, also connects with more recent conversations about the significance of historical and indigenous forms of knowledge and practices as necessary alternatives to the extractivism that plague modern societies. Evidence of these local and vernacular forms can be abundantly found everywhere in the architecture, art, cosmology, cuisine, and literature across the city, as well as in the diversity of its inhabitants—people whose relation to local and regional ecosystems have been fine-tuned over millennia of cohabitation and adaptation.

LB03’s gathering of artists from South and Southeast Asia and beyond addresses urgent topics in a region that in recent years has seen calamitous floods and degraded environment aggravated by agricultural disasters, urban pollution, and social inequality. These problems, which now cannot be ignored, have long been in gestation. The exhibition will feature contributions by artists that suggest aesthetic, sensorial, conceptual, and collective ways to address such challenges, while also underscoring resonances between the histories of Lahore and Pakistan with other parts of the world that face similar issues.

Free and open to the public, the Biennale commences on Saturday, October 5, and will run through Friday, November 8, complemented by a number of collateral exhibitions and programs scattered all over the city. During the opening weekend (October 5–7), in addition to experiencing the Biennale and other shows, visitors will have the opportunity to partake in a number of exclusive events, including private collection viewings, studio visits, artist talks and programs, live performances, and other cultural events (such as heritage and culinary tours) across the city. The visitors will be able to fully enjoy Lahore’s famous hospitality.

For its closing program (November 2–8), the Biennale builds on the solidarity of these parallels by convening a mix of leading and emerging researchers, artists, curators, and other practitioners for the Climate Congress, which under the stewardship of Iftikhar Dadi and John Tain, offers an occasion for South-South conversations around the role of the arts and humanities to meaningfully contribute to wider efforts to build. By positioning Lahore as a strategic location for global efforts to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis, it signals the need to shift agency for environmental discourse to the very societies that will be most affected. The Climate Congress is supported by a grant from the Getty Foundation.