Hajra Haider Karrar

Biography

Hajra Haider Karrar is a curator and writer invested in articulating questions that destabilize and reconfigure colonial and capital paradigms underlying knowledge production by working through ancestral and affective epistemes. She is curator at SAVVY Contemporary: The Laboratory of Form-Ideas, Berlin, and the guest curator of Colomboscope IX, 2026. Formerly, Hajra was chief curator of the IVS Gallery and faculty of visual arts at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi; and a core member of the Tentative Collection, a gathering of artists, curators and educators interested in engaging with the specificities and commonalities of modernity in rapidly growing cities of the global south, who work site specifically in response to the cities they inhabit, creating poetic and ephemeral moments in conversation with the city’s infrastructures.

Since joining SAVVY Contemporary in Summer 2021, Hajra has lead curated the multichapter research project Unravelling the (Under-) Development Complex 2021-2024, Historical Children: Lullabies from Wounds to Wonder 2024-2025, the yearlong participatory project How Will you Ascertain Time? 2022, and The Wind in your Body is just Visiting, Your Breath will soon be Thunder by Pallavi Paul for the Forum Expanded, Berlinale, 2022. She was the co-curator for Indigo Waves & Other Stories: Re-navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora, 2022-2024, and ENIGMA #59: ROMAN, a retrospection by Bili Bidjocka for Berlin Art Week, 2021.

Amongst previous significant curatorial projects, Karrar initiated the ongoing discursive project Who Gets to Talk About Whom? Collective Thinking and its Politics in the Decolonial Turn in 2018. She also curated a trilogy of survey exhibitions Look at the City from Here featuring Bani Abidi, Risham Syed, and Farida Batool in 2016 at AAN Art Space and Museum, Karachi in 2016 – an investigation into the diverse approaches employed by the three female artists navigating and engaging with contested histories and contemporary life in South Asian cities and the significance of these feminist approaches in the contemporary art history of Pakistan.

Karrar’s curatorial and collaborative projects have been featured at cultural institutions and biennales including Tate Research Centre: Asia, London 2018; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow 2014; Centre Pompidou, Paris 2017; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester 2016-2017; Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku 2012; Akademie der Künst, Berlin; Lahore Biennale 02, IV Moscow Biennale for Young Art, 5th International Biennale of Contemporary Art Azerbaijan, and Kochi – Muziris Biennale 2022.

Hajra has edited multiple publications and her writings on artistic practice, and visual and media cultures are regularly published in journals, monographs, and publications.

Other major solo projects include:

• Pasture Still Green? IV Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, 2014. Moscow Russia. A comment on immigration patterns while reversing the gaze inwards in search of the true perception of reality at the home ground.
• Tracing the Void, IVS Gallery, Karachi, 2015, and Afterimages: Of Erasure at UQBAR, Berlin. 2016. Featuring two artists from Germany and Pakistan in a sequence of two exhibitions in Karachi and Berlin.
• ABOUT TIME at the Napa International Theatre and Music Festival, 2016. aimed at identifying and exploring the many intersections between performing, performance and non-performance art.
• She has also initiated a long-term research project conducting a Drawing Survey of Pakistani Contemporary Art 1980 – 2016 which was set off by the exhibition What is Seen and Not Seen With or Without Seeing, focusing on 12 artists, all trained at the same institution during this period.

With the Tentative Collection Hajra has worked on projects including:
• Projections: a series of collaborative experiments on the possibilities and limitations of public art practice in Karachi. 2014.
• The Gandi Engine Commission: a site-specific workshop that navigated through the River Ravi to explore themes of development and destruction, waste and toxicity. Lahore. 2015
• Transcribed Text for a Lost Moment: a screenplay based on the Berliner Lautarchive British and Commonwealth (audio) Recordings of Indian (soldiers) prisoners of War WW1 by Wilhelm Doegen. In Berlin, Kochi, Banglore and Lahore. 2016
• Waste Agency: contextualizes urban rituals in the construction of progress through experimental conversations with discarded objects; it relates the consumption of modernity with its parallel universe of peripheral, abandoned objects. For Public Space Fights and Fictions at Akademie der Kunst. Berlin. 2016
• Shershah and Other Stories: Revolves around ideas of transitioning economies in the aspiring city of Karachi. The project collages together questions regarding the valuable and the wasted by engaging in the intimately local rhythms of work which point towards global shifts in production. For Cosmopolis #1 at Centre Pompidou. Paris 2017

At the British Museum
During her time on the International Training Programme in 2014, Hajra was based in the Asia Department and her partner placement was spent at Manchester Art Gallery and Manchester Museum.

In 2014 participants were asked to prepare a project outlining an exhibition proposal based on the Asahi Shimbun Displays – a temporary exhibition in Room 3 at the British Museum.  Hajra’s exhibition project proposal was entitled, Hokusai: On the Way to Mount Fuji.

Hajra’s place on the International Training Programme was generously supported by the Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust, British Council and the Rangoonwala Foundation.

Legacy Projects
In November 2015 Hajra was selected for the ITP Mumbai Workshop Creating Museums of World Stories. The workshop was held at CSMVS and was attended by many ITP fellows from different years and countries, UK partners and British Museum Colleagues.

Continued Dialogue
Hajra has also worked on a project ARTISTS MISSING as a member of the Tentative Collective, with her UK partner Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester Museum and the Whitworth Art Gallery for the New North and South Initiative.

ITP Newsletter Publications
ITP Newsletter Issue 5 (2018), Global perspectives: Art as an act of resistance to time