Islamabad Biennale Organization is pleased to announce a formal Residency Partnership with Dastaangoi—an equal and creative collaborator that enhances IBO’s commitment to discursive, site-sensitive, and durational practice in contemporary art.

This alliance reflects a convergence of institutional vision and curatorial hospitality, rather than a hierarchical model.

Faizan Naveed and Sehrish Mustafa lead this residency programme, bringing their combined backgrounds in critical pedagogy, studio practice, and academic research to bear. Under their guidance, the residency becomes a dynamic laboratory where artists, writers, curators, and thinkers engage in prolonged inquiry, not just production. Residential time is shaped as co-learning, research-led practice, and embodied engagement with place.

Dastaangoi—under the creative direction of Amad Mian—brings to this partnership more than logistics. Its curatorial approach, grounded in immersive narrative and sensory architecture, resonates deeply with IBO’s own curatorial philosophy. Exhibitions like Reflections and Liminal Spaces have used scent, ambient design, and architectural atmosphere to create experiential environments that dissolve the distance between artwork and site (Reflections: viewers used candles to view works, rooms scented with damask rose, ragas played softly as part of the experience).

At the heart of this collaboration is a carefully considered philosophy shaped by Idrees Hanif and Syed Hashim Hussain—one that emphasizes civic responsibility, intellectual hospitality, and the subtle power of individual vision in shaping collective frameworks. Institutions, in this view, are not predefined entities but evolving constellations of people, practices, and ideas. Within this sensibility, Dastaangoi is not simply a host or backdrop; it is an active creative collaborator—co-shaping the spatial, social, and imaginative environment of the residency. The collaboration is not anchored in uniformity, but in a mutual commitment to creating conditions where artistic inquiry and experimentation are meaningfully supported.

This partnership articulates a shared belief in slow infrastructure, discursive residency, and peer-learning ecosystems—terms echoed in international discourse around cultural infrastructure, site-based research, and critical curatorial exchange. It marks a shift from spectacle to structure, from episodic events to deliberate, long-term institutional programming.

Artist, writer, curator and co – founder of IBO, Talal Faisal Ismaili captures the impulse behind this moment: a curatorial language grounded in urgent form, urban resonance, and reflective critique—not in nostalgic historicism. The residency’s ethos echoes this generational shift: training artists not only in the language of critique, but in the grammar of civic and ecological imagination.

In philosophical terms, this collaboration evokes Hannah Arendt’s notion of culture as a “space of appearance,” in which individuals come together in plurality and shared meaning-making. Here, residencies are not isolated retreats but collective appearances, where the artist, the audience, and the environment co-constitute meaning. Similarly, echoing John Dewey, the residency fosters experiential learning—where aesthetics become dialectical, dialogic, and relational.

By confirming Dastaangoi as a creative collaborator—rather than a logistical service—the partnership avoids instrumentalization. Instead, it signals that cultural partnership is conceptual as well as practical, where both platforms contribute to shaping and activating practice in Islamabad.

This is not an arrangement of lent resources, but a shared commitment to cultivating future-facing, civic imagination.

Artists selected for the residency will work, teach, respond, and archive. Their outputs will not merely appear at Biennale venues—they will resonate across time, site, and public domain. The site becomes a living archive, the partnership becomes a pedagogical structure, and each residency becomes a gesture in an unfolding creative lineage.

As IBO approaches its full biennale edition in 2027, this collaboration serves as its structural backbone—not a prelude. It models how residencies—anchored by individual agency, pedagogical depth, institutional clarity, and spatial hospitality—can become foundational to cultural futures. It is through such partnerships, shaped by philosophy and practice, that institutions become meaningful, not monumental.