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As the City of Gardens prepares to host the fourth Lahore Biennale in the spring, two more high-profile events have been added to the calendar. The International Biennial Association will be hosting its 14th General Assembly and inaugural Regional Meeting for Asia alongside the Biennale from March 27 to 31, the organisation announced on Friday.
The venue for the General Assembly — an annual meeting of professionals working on art biennials and triennials worldwide — was decided following an open call for applications earlier this year. The 2024 meeting was held in Sydney and other host cities have included Sharjah, Venice, Istanbul, and Liverpool.
The five-day programme will include a number of conferences, round tables, workshops, and public events. These will be in addition to the Biennale’s own programming and exhibitions, which will continue till April 25.
The newly introduced Regional Meeting for Asia follows two editions of a similar gathering in Europe by the International Biennial Association. The Lahore Biennale Foundation (LBF) said the two meetings will share some agenda items and events, but the regional meet will “place particular emphasis on workshops and discussions addressing the specific opportunities, challenges and institutional realities shaping biennial practice across Asia”.
The LBF invited “universities, cultural institutions, civic organisations, artists, researchers, and other partners from across Asia broadly, and the wider international community” to the regional meeting, hoping to foster “exchange, collaboration and new forms of regional connection”.
The fourth Lahore Biennale is curated by Nav Haq, who serves as associate director at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium. The theme for 2027 edition is The Shape of Coexistence.
“Responding to a multipolar world, [the fourth Lahore Biennale] positions Lahore as a historic and contemporary artistic and intellectual centre from which to imagine new ways of building internationalisms that are relevant for the twenty-first century,” as per the LBF.
The foundation said the exhibition “will explore new solidarities and forms of exchange, drawing on the histories and engagements that connect Lahore with wider regions across Asia and beyond while foregrounding questions of plurality and social equality”.
Cover photo: Lahore Biennale Foundation