Fazal Rizvi on Home-Not-Alone residency in Karachi

What is a residency without travel? How can residencies and artistic exchange continue, especially in a time of no travel? Following reflections with Pro Helvetia offices across the world, we have embarked on a project called the ‘Home Not Alone’ residencies. Here, artists across the world, including Pakistani visual artist Fazal Rizvi, aim to realise projects while “staying at home”.

Fazal Rizvi is an interdisciplinary artist based in Karachi, Pakistan. His inquiry rests somewhere between the personal, the social and the political. Having spent a few years thinking about the sea and its borders, histories and materiality, he also keeps returning to the personal and the familial as a place of trigger.

Rizvi is also a recipient of a year-long studio residency at Jan van Eyck Academie, 2020-2021. He was also selected for the Arcus Project Residency, Japan in 2011, the Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust and British Council Residency at Gasworks, London in 2014, and the Vasl International Artist Residency in 2015. He is currently teaching at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi.

Fazal will be undertaking the home-not-alone residency from Karachi in Pakistan. Entitled “The Sherbet Project,”  Rizvi’s undertaking revolves around the memories and nostalgia surrounding his maternal aunt.

“The Sherbet Project is a project that revolves around my aunt, my mother’s oldest sister, who died in 2008,” says Rizvi. “She used to make a sherbet, a sweet drink syrup with mint, which was the most amazing of drinks I can remember. The recipe of it, died with her. As part of the project I want to attempt to replicate that recipe from what my memory remembers of it. And see where else the process of making, uncovering and unravelling the recipe may take me.”

Follow the hashtag #homenotaloneresidency to stay updated on the residency program taking place with participants from Switzerland, Congo, Egypt, Morocco, and Pakistan. Read more about the participants and residency here.

Artist image: courtesy artist and Grey Noise, Dubai
Studio garden image: courtesy Fazal Rizvi