Founded in 2020, The Karachi Collective (TKC) has been established as a digital platform aspiring to stimulate and propel research alongside substantial documentation. The focus is on art, design and creativity in the city of Karachi as its epicenter and to extend to regions beyond its borders. As a nucleus of activity and the beginning of a dialogic creative exploration for TKC, Karachi is the perfect city to extend from centrifugally. It is a city with the largest population in Pakistan, brimming with a diversity of cultures, peoples, languages, and histories.
The Karachi Collective facilitates an interchange of ideas and generates collaborations, to build a co-op of scholars, researchers and practitioners from diverse trajectories of cultural and creative diligences rooted in the local, national, and South Asian context. The collective’s precept anchors itself to critical engagement by looking into the relationship of contemporary art with socially engaged practices, pluralism, and globalization. Engaging with phenomenological examination and exploration of the evolution and contemporary manifestations of design, histories and narratives around objects of design, and with the philosophies influencing and underpinning art and design in South Asia. It creates a discourse on the overarching ramifications of design in building communities and instigating social change; and ontological and epistemological design trajectories. The collective systematically delves into traditional creative utilitarian crafts and textiles —their immersion into, and relationship with, the modern. TKC analytically and critically engrosses itself with the juxtaposition of critical concepts and the practice of making, and aims to delve deeply into the creative explorations on process – autoethnographic, phenomenological and writing as inquiry, investigating material culture and mass consumption, alongside enquiry of embodied & tacit knowledge of craft, textiles and fashion.
The goal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on areas of Contemporary Art, Design, and Interdisciplinary Humanities for a cross cultural exploration and subsequent innovations and collaborations in these areas.
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The opinions expressed on this website are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect opinions or views of TKC or its members. The essays and the presentation of material, therein do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of TKC concerning the legal status of any individual, group, country, area, territory or of its authorities.
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