Alia Farid

Nili-Ravi Call, 2019 – 2020
Film, new commission

Alia Farid works across the disciplines of art, architecture, and urban anthropology. In the past, her research-driven practice has investigated experiences, institutions, and landscapes in the Middle East, often with a view to examining the impact of modernization, urbanization, and in many cases colonization has had upon these societies, as well as upon the ecology of the land itself. For the Lahore Biennale 02 Farid extends her geographic range to Pakistan, focusing on the province of Punjab. In this region, transformed by nineteenth century colonial irrigation regimes into a ‘bread basket’, the fertile alluvial plains of the Indus and its four tributaries – Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, and Sutlej run from north to south. Against this backdrop, Farid aims to examine diverse activities that occur in proximity to the rivers themselves, exploring the ways in which nature, man and animals interact, from the conviviality a farmer may share with her livestock, to a fisherman’s affective ties to the elements that create both a dependency as well as a predatory relation to nature. How has the relationship between humans and animals changed in this part of the world? What does its evolution in the decades since partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 reveal about the predicament of post-colonial societies?

عالیہ فرید