Karachi Biennale 2027
Kal (Yesterday/Tomorrow)

The Karachi Biennale 2027 is presented as a maiden voyage for Tomorrow, positing Karachi as an urban

archipelago of invention, mythologies, and habitats, where sediments of the past and horizons of the future mingle in brackish currents. KB27 is a dedication for the hopeful Tomorrow.

 

Karachi’s emergence as a colonial port in the nineteenth century marked it as a strategic point in global networks of trade, labour, and extraction. Unfolding through myriad narratives and histories, the Biennale takes inspiration from Karachi’s port, and the archival image that depicts a scene, likely taken from on board a ship, showing five dhows with two-lateen sail rigs at anchor in Karachi’s harbour, with vessels poised for departure and arrival. The image is from the British Library’s India Office Records and reveals both the potential and the violence of the city’s history, the accumulation of wealth and goods, the displacement of communities, and the creation of a metropolis defined as much by fracture as by the promise of tomorrow. The India Office Records are the records of the colonial period in South Asia and include the archives of not only South Asia but also Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Africa, and have been hugely influential in how many students of post-colonial theory envisage their work and surroundings, and compare similar realities the world over. The archival image is also a haunting reminder of the politics of the archive and its access, as well as how profoundly a national, continental, or global narrative can change when the geo-political voyage of the narrator is altered.

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Today, Karachi stands at another threshold. Its ecological precarity, the choked mangroves, rising sea levels, and poisoned waters, converge with the pressures of unplanned urbanisation, sectarian and ethnic confrontations, and the contested memories of its identity. Karachi is also a confluence of displacement and migration. To address Karachi only as a site of crisis, however, is to miss its role as a locus invention. Its polyphony of languages, its diasporic extensions across continents, and its indigenous knowledge of the sea and tides all testify to a living archive of reinvention that can be mirrored through legends and

lived realities across the world.

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Tomorrow positions Karachi not merely as a backdrop but as a protagonist in the global conversation on art and its responsibilities. The thematic of the Biennale invokes the hope of a ship’s first journey, but redirects it away from conquest and commerce toward inclusivity and imagination. This is not a voyage of return to an originary past, but of departure into possible futures. It is a call to artists, thinkers, governments and publics to embark collectively on an expedition to reimagine tomorrow.

 

The thematic also recalls Édouard Glissant's, The Open Boat, where his essay concludes with the idea that “our

boats are open, and we sail them for everyone”. Tomorrow, hosted by a city formed through migrations and

movements, embodies Glissant's notion that identities are never fixed but continually reshaped through creolisation, collision, and reconstitution, and instead leverages social invention and a new, collective reality, to resist pre-existing hierarchy. This is further expanded on through a vast array of local literature and water mythology that are older even than the city.

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KB27 therefore chooses public spaces, ports, and parks as the forum in which to have this conversation. It seeks to create conditions in which artists can engage with the public, not as a resolution but to generate new images, scientific innovation, languages, and practices through which Karachi, and the world beyond it, may be reimagined. In positioning itself a maiden voyage, KB27 affirms the conviction that tomorrow must be collective and co-created. Here, art is not a mirror but a vessel through which to tether us into our future.