The Lahore Biennale is the international contemporary art biennial of Pakistan, organised by the Lahore Biennale Foundation (LBF) — a non-profit organisation established in 2014 by the artist and curator Qudsia Rahim and the Lahore-based businessman Osman Khalid Waheed. The first edition (LB01), held in March 2018, was led editorially by a curatorial team comprising Qudsia Rahim, Mariah Lookman and Zarmina Rafi, later joined by Iftikhar Dadi, Aziz Sohail and Amna Suheyl who programmed the performances, lectures, workshops and symposia. The first edition's institutional history is itself a matter of record: the artist Rashid Rana, named in 2014 as the founding artistic director, resigned in August 2017, and the inaugural edition was reorganised under the in-house LBF curatorial team in the months that followed.
The 3rd Lahore Biennale, Of Mountains and Seas, opened on 5 October 2024 and ran through 8 November 2024 across approximately a dozen venues citywide, with sixty-some participating artists from thirty countries. Its curator, John Tain — Taipei-born, Harvard- and UC Berkeley-trained, currently Head of Research at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, and previously a curator of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute — selected ecologies and sustainable futures as the edition's principal subject, programming work that addressed the calamitous floods, agricultural disasters and urban environmental degradation that have reshaped life across South and Southeast Asia in recent years. The historic UNESCO World Heritage site of the Lahore Fort, used as a principal venue in the first two editions, was again the central historic site; the Shalimar Gardens — the great Mughal hydrological and garden ensemble — were programmed for the first time as a biennial venue.
The institutional argument across three editions
The Lahore Biennale's continuing institutional argument has been that an international contemporary art biennial sited in Lahore — programmed across historic sites that pre-date the contemporary biennial system by four centuries, in a city whose contemporary art education at the National College of Arts has produced one of South Asia's most consequential contemporary art generations — produces a different working relationship to the international biennial circuit than the relationship a biennial sited in a major Western capital can produce. The 2nd edition, between the sun and the moon, held from 26 January to 29 February 2020 under guest curator Hoor Al Qasimi (then and still President and Director of the Sharjah Art Foundation), opened just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic closed international travel and operated with eighty-some artists' projects and more than twenty new commissions sited from Hazuri Bagh and the Lahore Fort to the PIA Planetarium.
LB04, scheduled to open in spring 2027 and to coincide with the eightieth anniversary of the Partition of British India and the founding of Pakistan, will be curated by the British-Pakistani curator Nav Haq, currently Associate Director at M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp). His announcement was made in February 2026. The curatorial framework Haq has set out — the vitality of society and culture across borders, and the capacity of art to generate new solidarities in a multipolar world — is the institutional commitment under which the LBF has framed the 80th-anniversary edition.
