Very Very Sweet Medina

Durriya Kazi & David Alesworth 1999
Private Collection

Durriya Kazi Is an artist and an academic.
Focusing on the idea of wider audiences and exploring the potential of artistic practice beyond the colonial legacy of the white cube. This has manifested in interactive publle art projects, collaborations with communities, and decades of research based on the elaborate decorative methods and motifs used on vehicles such as trucks, buses and rickshaws, as well as cinema painting, crafts, social histories and the diffusion of cuiture in Pakistan.

David Alesworth is an artist, landscape consultant, researcher of garden history and art educator, who worked in Karachi and Lahore for more than 20 years and who still divides his time between Bristol and Pakletan. Trained originally as a sculptor in the UK, he moved to Paklstan in 1887, where his work focused on the popular visual culture of South Asia, encountered in bazaars, including the elaborate decorations on trucks and buses.
In this collaborative work, Alesworth and Kazi address Issues of authorship, particlpation and collaboration, breaking through the hierarchles of high art and low art, and of the ordering system Imposed between art, craft, and popular and folk culture. Additionally, Very Very Sweet Medina (Home Sweet Home) looks at ideas of belonging, home, movement and migration. For Musilms, the migration of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina is regarded as an Incredibly significant event, with the Muslim calendar beginning at this date. Here the artists also point to the coastal city of Karachi, often called the city of migrants due to the waves of migrations both from within and outside the country’s borders, witnessed since
1947.

These migrations have turned Karachi into Pakistan’s most diverse city, home to millions of diverse Individuals with their own hopes, dreams and desires. @Qatar_Museums
@NMOQatar
@alesworth