About the Artists
Abdullah MI Syed
Dr. Abdullah M. I. Syed (b. 1974) is a Pakistani-born contemporary artist and designer working between Sydney, Karachi and New York. His art practice weaves real and fictional narratives of east and west, seamlessly knitting together cultural and art historical references and concerns from each. Trained in diverse disciplines, Syed utilises a variety of mediums and techniques including sculpture, video installations, drawing, performance and texts to investigate collisions between art, religion, economy and politics.
Syed holds a PhD in Art, Media and Design (2015) and a Master of Fine Arts (2009) from University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He also holds a Bachelor of Art in Design (1999) and a Master of Education (2001) from University of Central Oklahoma (UCO), Edmond, Oklahoma, USA. Syed is part of eleven, a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and writers.
Syed has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and performed at the Asia Triennial of Performance Art (Asia TOPA 2017) in Melbourne, Pataka Museum in Proirua, Art Central in Hong Kong, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney, and Stage Centre in Oklahoma. Syed’s work is held in many private and public collections notably Devi Art Foundation, Rangoonwala Foundation, AAN Collection, Blacktown Arts Centre, Casula Powerhouse, University of Central Oklahoma and the US State Department Art in Embassy Islamabad.
Syed has undertaken artist residencies at Fairfield City Museum and Gallery (2015-2016), Parramatta Artists Studios (2013-2015), Cicada Press (2009 and 2013) and Blacktown Arts Centre (2011) in Sydney. His awards include the Blacktown Art Prize (2010), the UNSW Postgraduate Research Scholarship (2009) and the IAO Installation Art Award (2003). Syed was highly commended in the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize (2014) and was a finalist in the Hazlehurst Prize (2015), Moran Photography Prize (2014) and the Blake Prize (2013 and 2016).
Kingsley Gunatillake
Born in 1951 in Kandy, Kingsley Gunatillake's practice involves painting, drawing and installation.He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Fine Art University of Colombo in 1979 and a Diploma in Environmental Education from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow in 1994. He has had several solo exhibitions in Sri Lanka, the UK, the Philippines, Ireland, Scotland, India and Japan. He has also participated in many group exhibitions and international artist camps both in Sri Lanka and abroad, most recently in France, the UK, Japan, Pakistan, India and at the Seongnam International Art Fair in Korea. Gunatillake has also been the recipient of a number of national awards since 1980 as well as international awards from both Czechoslovakia and Japan. He is a council member of the Vibhavi Academy Fine Arts and a founder of Child Art Studio. Gunatillake’s painting, sculpture and installations can be found in many local collections, including the Sri Lankan Presidential Collection of Contemporary Art. He currently works out of his studio in Kandy and Colombo.
Tahireh Lal
Tahireh Lal (b. New Delhi, India) is an Indian artist and her practice is reflexive. Her work deals with ideas of movement and stasis that stem from her mobile existence. She uses local contexts and materials to explore ideas, particularly notions of time and home. Her ideas find expression in the form of video, installation and sculpture.
Her artwork has been featured at film festivals and in galleries both in India and at international events such as the Videonale in Bonne, Germany, and Nuit Blanche in Toronto, Canada. She had her first solo at Gallery SKE in Bangalore (2014) and was an Inlaks Fine Art Awardee for the year 2016. She received her Master’s in Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), University in Toronto, Canada. The OCAD University India Scholarship funded her graduate work. She completed her undergraduate education with distinction at the Srishti School of Art Design and Technology in Bangalore, India. She is currently based out of Koliabor in Assam, India.
Zoya Siddiqui
Zoya Siddiqui (b.1990) is a visual artist based between Lahore and Vancouver, working primarily in video, performance, installation and photography. She has been part of residencies at the Vasl Artists’ Collective Karachi, Delfina Foundation London, Theertha Performance Platform in Colombo, In-Situ UK, and is an alumnus of the Triangle Arts Association. Siddiqui has shown her works internationally on platforms such as the Dhaka Art Summit and Lahore Literary Festival, and in cities such as New York, New Delhi, Philadelphia, Lahore, Karachi and Brierfield. Her recent exhibitions include ‘The Edge’ at Bikaner House, New Delhi and ‘Parentheses’ at David Nolan in New York.
Through varying routes, Siddiqui’s practice seeks to understand the tensions between nearness-farness, insider-outsider, strangerhood-intimacy or public-private. A common denominator between all works is performance; anchored in her voice, shown explicitly through her body, implied in the curation of events etc. She has a sustained interest in the implied eye of the technology used to film or photograph.
Liz Fernando
Liz Fernando is a photographer whose work finds its roots in conceptual research. Her research though at a personal as well as academic level into the role of photography highlights the different meanings that photography, inhabits, often dealing with the notions of memory wherein the personal archive inhabits a fundamental space, both aesthetically and practically within non-western cultures.
She describes her practise as:
‘The scientific, almost forensic search for the boundaries of the understanding and interpretation of
photography, the fusion of anthropological questions and modern photographic techniques as a tool to explore wider issues such as cultural difference, cultural inheritance, belonging and identity’.
In 2011 she graduated from the prestigious LCC BA Photography programme at the University of Arts, London. In 2012 she was selected as the winner for the WorldBank South Asian contest. Several selected photographs taken from her award-winning work “Trincomalee – My father’s stories and the lost photographs” were acquired by the World Bank in Washington D.C for its permanent collection.
Her work continues to receive critical praise from influential editors and curators and is currently featured in numerous private collections.
