Hammad Nasar

Curatorial essay for the exhibition, 'Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play' – the UAE's National Pavilion at the 57th Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. It considers the fruitful ambiguity of 'play' to enact a habitation of home through playful gestures and acts, in which bodies mark time and transform space.

An introduction to the work of the Dubai-based artist, Lantian Xie, and his commission for the UAE's National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale – 'A rumble interrupted our chat'. The article reads Xie's practice through a selection of key works that explore his interests in sites, itinerancy and the circulation of histories, imaginaries and affinities.

This text contextualises the growing global interest in the artistic practices of a group of artists trained in Lahore's National College of the Arts' Miniature Department (including Imran Qureshi and Shahzia Sikander) through the lenses of institution building, internationalisation and collaboration. It outlines the role of pedagogy with a comparison between the role of Zahoor ul Akhlaq at the NCA with that of Gulammohammed Sheikh in Baroda; and the influence of new centres of the contemporary artistic production and display through the example of Sharjah.

The LYC Museum & Art Gallery (the LYC) in the Cumbrian village of Banks (astride Hadrian’s Wall) was the single-minded effort of artist Li Yuan-chia (1929–1994). His initials gave the museum its name. It was sited in a set of converted farm buildings that Li had bought from his friend, the painter Winifred Nicholson. Between 1972 and 1983, the museum showcased the work of more than 320 artists—from local artists (Andy Christian, Susie Honour) to totemic national figures (Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth), and contemporary artists, now of international renown (Lygia Clark, Andy Goldsworthy), but then barely known in Britain. A young David Nash designed the LYC’s window. The programme reflected Li’s circuitous cosmopolitanism, his commitment to art as experimentation, and his expansive range of interests: the LYC had a children’s room, library, performance space, printing press, communal kitchen, and a garden. The networks and practices that the LYC enabled and enriched have yet to be studied widely, but it is an exemplary site from which to explore how friendships inform shared practices, generate work, and socialise narratives; and, how the LYC itself functioned as a kind of infrastructure. This article is anchored in the recent exhibition Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition (Manchester Art Gallery, 2018–2019) and its accompanying symposium The LYC Museum & Art Gallery and the Museum as Practice (2019). It explores the idea of “friendship”, and to a lesser extent that of “infrastructure”, through the lens of three works in the Speech Acts exhibition. It forms part of an ongoing collective effort towards inquiries that cross disciplinary and geographic borders, and test polyphonic, multi-authored, and speculative approaches that I have described elsewhere as “art histories of excess”. It invites methodological reflections on the forms and possibilities for conducting and staging collaborative research, and on wider questions of how historic entanglements have the potential to expand existing histories of British art.

Examines Tate's 'Migrations' (2012) exhibition as an inadvertent restaging of Rasheed Araeen's seminal 'The Other Story' (1989), and looks at the overlapping histories being formed by newer exhibitions on Araeen and Li Yuan-chia in Taiwan, Sharjah and Karachi. Published in Field Notes 4 (2015) by Asia Art Archive.

This essay sets out the lines of inquiry underpinning the Lines of Control project (2005-ongoing). Areas covered include:
The Partition and Representation; Difference and Nation; Border and Control; and, Memory and Commemoration. Published in the book length catalogue accompanying the exhibition at Cornell University's Johnson Museum, and edited by Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar (2012).

Gupta, Sunil, Singh, Radikal, Nasar, Hammad, Alam, Shahidul, Pinney, Christopher, Gadihoke, Sabeena and Kapur, Geeta. 2010. Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. London, UK: Whitechapel Gallery, ...

Parallel streams of photography - from documentary to artists working with the photographic image - emerging from Pakistan. Originally published in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition 'Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 years of photography in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh' at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. Published by Steidl in 2010.

Asia Art Archive was established in 2000 in Hong Kong to document and secure the multiple recent histories of contemporary art in the region. Built through a systematic programme of research and information gathering, it is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading public collections of primary and secondary source material about contemporary art in Asia, comprising hundreds of thousands of physical and digital items, searchable via its online catalogue. A growing selection of digitised material is now also available in the Collection Online.

... Abstract or Description. The thriving 1960s and 70s London art scene was arguably less receptive to artists from beyond Europe and the US. Panelists Rachel Garfield, Amna Malik, Hammad Nasar and Niru Ratnam discuss the impact on artists and art history. ...

A reflection on the collaboration between contemporary artist, Imran Qureshi and cricketers from the Pakistan Super League cricket franchise, Islamabad United. This short text considers the PSL and Lahore's National College of the Arts as parallel 'pipelines of hope', and speculates on what may emerge from this ongoing effort at collaboration.

This London, Asia, Exhibitions, Histories special issue of British Art Studies is the first publication to emerge from the London, Asia research project. The project, which is funded and hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (PMC), is co-lead by Hammad Nasar, Senior Research Fellow and Sarah Victoria Turner, Deputy Director for Research at the Centre. Established in collaboration with Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive (AAA), it explores the ways in which modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersects with, and challenges, existing histories of British art. This introduction explores the main themes of this special issue, and reflects on the premise and themes of the broader London, Asia project as it has developed thus far through an ongoing series of collaborations and provocations staged primarily through events and exhibitions.