Naiza Khan is a visual artist that trained at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and completed her MA at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. Khan’s multi-disciplinary practice is built on a process of critical research, documentation and mapping-based exploration. Through a range of media, including drawing, printmaking, archival material and film, she brings together ideas of embodiment and ecology. Her work looks at geography as a heterogeneous assemblage of power, colonial history and collective memory.
Khan works between London and Karachi.
Contact: studionaiza@gmail.com website: www.naizakhan.com Instagram: naiza_khan_artEducation
2020 MA (Distinction) Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London
2017 MA University of Oxford, Somerville College
1990 BFA, University of Oxford, Somerville College Ruskin School of Art
Solo exhibitions (selected)
All exhibitions with published catalogues are marked with an asterisk (*)
2024 Unruly Edges, Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong*
2019 Manora Field Notes, Pakistan Pavilion, 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia *
2017 Set in a moment yet still moving, Koel Gallery, Karachi *
New Works, Art Basel, HK Rossi & Rossi
2015 Undoing / Ongoing, Rossi & Rossi, London, UK*
2014 The Weight of Things, Koel Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan*
Disrupting the Alignment, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, UK
2013 Naiza Khan: Karachi Elegies, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum,
Michigan State University, USA
2010 Restore the Boundaries: The Manora Project, Rossi & Rossi, Art Dubai, Dubai, UAE
2008 The Skin She Wears, Rossi & Rossi, London, UK*
2007 Heavenly Ornaments, Canvas Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan*
2006 Bare the Fact, Bear the Fact, Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, India*
Group exhibitions (selected)
All exhibitions with published catalogues are marked with an asterisk (*)
2025 Mapping the Invisible. AAN Art Space & Museum
Karachi, Pakistan
Feminist Futures: Art, Activism, and South Asian Womanhood
Taragoan Museum, Kathmandu, Nepal
2024 MANZAR: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today.*
National Museum of Qatar
2023 14th Gwangju Biennale: soft and weak like water, Gwangju*
Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present. Sharjah Art Foundation*
2022 Pop South Asia: Artistic Explorations in the Popular. Sharjah Art Foundation*
Embodied Change: South Asian Art Across Time, Seattle Asian Art Museum
SOUL fury, Bendigo Art Gallery, Australia
2021 Monsoonal Multiplicities, virtual artists’ residency and exhibition.
2020 Between the Sun and the Moon, Lahore Biennale 02, Lahore, Pakistan *
2019 The Sea is History, Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, Norway *
2018 Lahore Biennale 01, Lahore
9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, The Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art
2017 Poetics of Material, Aicon Gallery, New York, USA
Turbulence, The Model, Sligo, Ireland
2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India
2015 Small Worlds, The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall, UK
2013 Mapping Gender: Bodies & Sexualities in Contemporary Art across the Global South,
School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India*
Metropolis: Reflections on the Modern City, Birmingham Museum Art Gallery UK
2012 Reactivation, 9th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China*
2011 Shifting Ground, Amelia Johnson Contemporary, Hong Kong, Rossi & Rossi*
2010 Between Kismet and Karma: South Asian Women Artists Respond to Conflict, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds, UK
2009 Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Asia Society Museum, New York, USA*
2007 Moving On: An Intensity of Space and Substance, Re-forming Landscape, Figurative
Impulse. Inaugural show at National Art Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan*
2005 Layers of Time and Space, ifa Galleries, Berlin and Stuttgart, Germany*
Beyond Borders: Art of Pakistan, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, India*
2004 Living Masters, Young Voices, Alhamra Art Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan*
2002 Threads, Dreams and Desires: ArtSouthAsia, Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston, UK*
2000 Pakistan: Another Vision: Fifty Years of Painting and Sculpture in Pakistan,
Brunei Gallery, London, UK*
Awards | Residencies
2025 Distinguished Artist Award, The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute Harvard University
2021 Monsoonal Multiplicities, Artist-in-residence, London
2017 Institute for Comparative Modernities, Artist-in-residence, Cornell University
2013 Prince Claus Award, Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, The Netherlands
2013 Fine Arts Award, Tehzeeb Foundation, Pakistan
2011 Pakistan Lecture Series Award, American Institute of Pakistan Studies
2003 Gasworks Residency, London, UK
43rd Premio Suzzara, Italy
National Excellence Award, 8th National Exhibition of Visual Arts, Pakistan
2002 1st Unilever Award. Visual Artist of the Year, Unilever, Pakistan
2001 Vasl International Artists’ Workshop (Triangle Arts Network), Gadani, Pakistan
Conferences | lectureships (selected)
2025 Critical Futures Conference. Keynote Speaker. Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture.
Karachi, Pakistan
A Drop Becoming the Ocean Lecture Series. The Aga Khan University. Karachi, Pakistan
Feminist Futures: Art, Activism, and South Asian Womanhood. Symposium Speaker. Kathmandu, Nepal
2024 Mapping Water: Between Paper, Memory and the Archive. Lecture and workshop,
Societies and Cultures Institute. University of Exeter, UK
Water Ways: Epistemologies and Aesthetics, Doha Institute of Graduate Studies,
Qatar Museums, Rubaiyat, Qatar
2023 Land and Memory, artist’s talk, NYU Abu Dhabi
Assemblage I: Body and Politics, Northumbria University
Extinct: Empire, Art and Natural Histories. Symposium, The Linnean Society and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
2022 Reimagining Mobilities/ Immobilities in the Indian Ocean, The Africa Institute, Sharjah
Engine of Art, Democracy and Social Justice, Vanderbilt University.
2021 Agency | Urgency: Learning from the Global South, University of California Santa Barbara
2020 In conversation with Prof Griselda Pollack, University of Leeds
2019 In conversation with Dr Emilia Terraciano, University of York
2018 University of Heidelberg, Asia-Europe Cluster: ln conversation with Dr Monica Jadeja
2017 Roger B. Henkle Memorial Lecture: The Disappearance of Things/The City as Archive.
Brown University/RISD
Objects from the Deep, lecture. The Institute for Comparative Modernities.
Cornell University- lecture.
The Expanded Field Seattle Art Museum, Gardner Center for Asian Art and Ideas
Art and Social Change, Seattle Public Library
2016 The Journey we Never Made, Dept of Art History and Archeology, SOAS London
Paul Mellon Centre, London, symposium:Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting
South Asia in Britain.
2016 Intolerance and the Media: India, Pakistan and the UK. (panellist)The Chevening South Asia
Journalism Symposium, UK
2014 Pakistan Urban Forum: South Asian Cities Conference, Karachi. (panelist)
Co-organised by South Asia Institute, Harvard University, Government of Sindh;
The Urban Unit, Government of Punjab; and the Institute of Architects, Pakistan.
2013 Violence, Insurgencies, Deceptions: Conceptualizing Urban Life in South Asia.
Asia Research Institute, NUS, Singapore, speaker.
NED University, Karachi, speaker: Re-thinking Urban in Pakistan
2012 What is the Pakistani Public? Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)
2011 Risk and Revolution. Lu Xun Academy of Fine Art, Dalian, China. IDRI International
Drawing Research Institute, COFA, Keynote
2011 Between Kismet and Karma: South Asian Women Artists Respond to Conflict.
Leeds Art Gallery, UK, speaker.
Bibliography (selected)
2023 Kabir, Ananya and Khan, Naiza. “Near and Far sightSites Converge”, MONSOON Journal
of the Indian Ocean rim. Duke Univ Press.
2022 Yaqin, Amina, and Naiza Khan. "Partition and its echoes in Karachi: The political agencies
of Fahmida Riaz and Perween Rahman." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 57.
Lahore Biennale Reader 01, Ed. Iftikhar Dadi, Published by Skira
2021 David Elliot, Art and Trousers: Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Asia Art, Chicago Univ. Press
2021 Khan, Naiza. "Walking inCommon: A Model for Mobile, Situated Knowledge."
Research in Arts and Education 2021, no.2
2019 Manora Field Notes, Naiza Khan. Pavilion of Pakistan, 58th International Art
Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Mousse Publishing.
2015 Karin Zitzewitz, ‘Life in Ruins: Materiality, the City, and the Production of Critique in the Art of Naiza Khan’, Journal of Asian Studies 74:2 (May)
Salima Hashmi, The Eye Still Seeks: Pakistani Contemporary Art, Penguin India.
2013 Naiza Khan Elaine W. (eds.) Masters, H.G. ArtAsiaPacific and the Broad Museum
2011 Monica Juneja, Global Art History and the ‘Burden of Representation’. Global
Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture, 274-297.
2010 Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia,
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill
2005 Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, Pandanus Books, Canberra
Academic Service | Curatorship
2013-2018 Karachi University, Visual Studies Department, Senior Advisor
2012-2014 Member of the Board of Governors, Indus Valley School of Art
2010 The Rising Tide: New Directions in Art from Pakistan, 1990–2010,
Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi, Pakistan
2007 Drawing the Line, part of the inaugural exhibition at the National Art Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan
1991-2009 Fine Art faculty - Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture
2003-2005 Co-ordinator Fine Art Department, IVSAA
2000-2014 Co-founded Vasl Artists’ Collective, Pakistan, part of the Triangle Network.