Through a new partnership with KKAF, Delfina Foundation is pleased to announce its first artist-in-residence from Pakistan.
Zoya Siddiqui, Geology of a Home, 2015. Live video installation. 19 x 24 feet.
Zoya Siddiqui’s residency is made possible through a newly established partnership between Delfina Foundation and Khurram Kasim Art Foundation (KKAF), a not-for-profit organisation created by Karachi based art collector Khurram Kasim established to provide a platform that supports all forms of artistic expression from and within Pakistan. This residency is KKAF’s first official initiative.
Zoya was selected from sixty applicants to an open call published in late 2017. She will join Delfina Foundation’s summer 2018 season where she will live alongside seven other residents, undertake artistic research, and engage with practitioners and institutions in London and beyond.
Zoya graduated from Beaconhouse National University, Lahore in 2013 and has since exhibited in the US, India and Pakistan. She is currently a Fulbright scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.
Zoya works primarily in video, performance, installation and photography. Through varying routes, her practice seeks to understand the tensions between nearness-farness, insider-outsider, strangerhood-intimacy or public-private. A common denominator between all works is performance; anchored in her voice, shown explicitly through her body, implied in the curation of events etc. She has a sustained interest in the implied eye of the technology used to film or photograph.
Recent works have sought to understand stranger sociality within differing environments by creating performative gestures or exercises that could allow for more personal interactions. For Geology of a Home, a temporal work that was executed in an abandoned mill in Lancashire, Zoya worked with local people of Pakistani origins to acknowledge and reclaim their connection to the space. Other works have explored the distanced consciousness inherent within current experiences of the world, mediated through the screen and other technologies; these shape our acts of looking from a distance. For Memoryscape II Zoya worked remotely with a drone operator to map/locate objects of memory around her home in Lahore.
For the KKAF residency at Delfina, Zoya will be considering the complex historical relationships between Pakistan and the UK. Specifically around the Pakistani body as a site of conflict in relation to British soil.
Zoya Siddiqui
Zoya Siddiqui (Lahore, Pakistan) has a practice that explores the existing tensions between nearness and farness, insider and outsider, stranger-hood and intimacy, to understand different socio-historic contexts and specificities and to create new opportunities for engagement between people. Zoya’s works involve installations, videos and photography, having as a common denominator performance, often related to gestures and exercises to allow more personal interactions or anchored in the use of her voice and body. In her latest work, Memoryspace II, in which drone footage of her home in Lahore is overlap by her voice speaking to its operator to locate and map her memory, Zoya has investigated the distanced consciousness inherent within current experiences and views of the world through maps, navigation, and city views.
Khurram Kasim Art Foundation (KKAF)
KKAF has been established to provide a platform that supports all forms of artistic expression from and within Pakistan. Through educational programmes, residencies, grants and events, KKAF seeks to facilitate and foster cultural exchange and dialogue between local and international artistic practices and art networks. KKAF is a newly launched not-for-profit organisation created by Karachi based art collector Khurram Kasim. This residency with Delfina Foundation is KKAF’s first official initiative.