Artists' Projections across Karachi city

From Universes-in-Universe's Nafas online magazine, a fascinating article by Simone Wille on the Tentative Collective, a group of young artists working across Karachi sharing ideas and resources and producing images, including projecting images onto city sites and surfaces from a rickshaw-powered projector.

The Collaborating across Divides article describes the multitude of cultures in the Pakistani city of Karachi, where many artists, filmmakers and writers all engage in their own ways with the multiple layers of this complex city, and explores the motivations and process adopted by artists in the Tentative Collective.

The Tentative Collective projections were carried out earlier in 2015 in collaboration with VASL Artists Collective at different sites across the city of Karachi:

PROJECTIONS - A Tentative Collective's project in collaboration with Vasl Artists' Collective.
We seek images of ourselves in our cities. Gazing at its walls for our reflections, we inhabit and haunt its material reality through projections. Through these projections we read, inscribe, understand and imagine ourselves, our communities, our histories and futures into the city's surfaces and crevices. In these projections, our infinite and divergent realities within the same spatiality are realised. The city transforms under the gaze of its inhabitants-the fixed materialities of its architecture rendered elastic.

Drawing on these everyday practices, artists, curators and creative practitioners will enact their own ephemeral projections in the city. The projections will take the form of luminous moving imagery, urban transference, performance of desires, evocation of memories, and playful engagements with architectural forms, spatial configurations and experiential modes. And through these intersecting projections we ask how we can momentarily inhabit each other’s imagination-each other’s city?

VASL Artists' Collective ran a year-long Asia-Europe Curatorial Knowledge Workshop in 2012, supported by the first ASEF Creative Encounters programme.