Ammara Jabbar

Ammara Jabbar is an artist and writer born and bred in Karachi, Pakistan. Like the heaving belly of a beast, the city is volatile yet disarming with his candour. Jabbar’s work draws from the visual cultures that run vagrant within the city, the simple yet momentous acts of everyday creation. Her art practice is intended to be a catalyst for dialogues surrounding gender and hierarchy. Mediated through satire and humour, she questions the structures that oppress the female body.

Within her practice she hopes to stifle with a form of rogue activism. Having grown up in a city with a penchant for magical realism, her work is a residual anecdotal offering to the city himself. Why yes, the city is a male, linguistically in Urdu. Although Jabbar thinks of it as a she. Drawn to poetics of the mundane, the fragrance of curry leaves and all conversations that are had with cup of brewed spiced tea, she values the act of artistic creation itself which is so endearingly human in its inception, after all one has never met a bird who went out to buy a painting to decorate her nest.

Jabbar was the winner of the Imran Mir Emerging Artist Prize 2018, and shortlisted for the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize in 2020. She has completed residencies in Karachi and London, including the Gasworks Winter Residency, and in 2020 was a Visiting Artist Fellow at the Mittal Institute, Harvard University. Selected solo exhibitions include: Systems Of a Liaison, VASL, Curated by Aziz Sohail (2019); GOOD TIME, Cinema.73, Curated by Noor B. Ahmed (2020). Selected group exhibitions include: Pretty Art for Pretty People, Sanat Initiative (2020); For The Wicked and the Valiant, O Art Space (2020); MICROCOSM, Gandhara (2021).

/* Mediated through satire and humour, she questions the structures that oppress the female body */