The Lahore Biennale Foundation Virtual Museum (LBF VM) is a digital platform for artists, academics and creative practitioners to re-examine our shared cultural language and artistic legacy. Knowledge creation and dissemination is the desired outcome of this collaborative experiment, with the project inviting a diverse group of curators, collaborators and artists across the board to respond and contribute to 75 years of Pakistan’s rich, multifaceted history post-independence.
Public spaces connect individuals with local communities by facilitating shared experiences and evoking memories of a common history. The tangible and intangible value of cultural heritage provides the public with a sense of belonging and for past lessons to be preserved and passed on. The link between heritage, local communities and future generations is an important asset in developing and sustaining cultural identity. The project is a response to broader socio-cultural changes in public interaction with cultural heritage, which has led to the need of providing people with a virtual (third) space to reconnect with their shared history.
The project also questions the role of the “traditional forms of museum making” and builds on the global reality of virtual connectivity despite physical borders, making cyberspace an ideal platform for local & global conversations -- transcending boundaries by making knowledge production an accessible and open-ended reality.
The curators for the project are Ali Usman Qasmi, Farida Batool, Masooma Syed, Sarmad Sultan Khoosat, Sarah Zaman and Tanvir Hasan, all responding to a different aspect of our country’s history, legacy and contributions.
Project Objectives
The Lahore Biennale Foundation's Virtual Museum engages in new forms of museum making, overcomes physical boundaries, and functions as an enduring online resource. It includes unconventional forms of knowledge production and dissemination by local academics and creatives across diverse mediums, exhibition spaces, and Pakistan's multifaceted cultural history post-independence. The LBF VM will serve as a site of ‘knowledge-in-the-making’ (Bjerregaard, 2020)1, by focusing on research-based and investigative approaches. It will also function as an online repository of data, “(third space)”; a virtual platform containing various forms of multimedia and facilitating interactions in a novel and evolving form of exhibition space.
