Hajra Haider Karrar
Hajra Haider Karrar is a curator and writer invested in articulating questions that destabilize and reconfigure colonial and capital paradigms that lay at the foundations of knowledge production by working through ancestral and affective epistemes. At present, she is Curator at SAVVY Contemporary: The Laboratory of Form-Ideas, Berlin. Formerly, she was the 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 Collective.
Since joining SAVVY Contemporary, she has lead curated the multichapter research project Unraveling the (Under-) Development Complex 2021 – 2024, the yearlong participatory project How Will You Ascertain Time? 2022, and The Wind in your Body is Just Visiting, Your Breathe 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 the Berlin Art Week, 2021.
Amongst previous significant 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 & Museum, Karachi in 2016.
Karrar’s curatorial and collaborative projects have been featured at cultural institutions and biennales including Tate Research Centre: Asia, London; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester; Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku; Akademie der Künst, Berlin; Lahore Biennale, Moscow Biennale for Young Art, International Biennale of Contemporary Art Azerbaijan, and Kochi – Muziris Biennale.
She has edited multiple publications and regularly contributes essays on artistic practice, visual and media cultures to publications, journals, and monographs.
Hajra@DAI: