2023 Recipient of the Sustainable Arts Fellowship
Visual artist Hasnat Mehmood trained in the miniature painting tradition at the National College of Arts, in Lahore, Pakistan, He currently works in multiple media including sound, drawing, installation, collage, performance, and interactive events. His work is informed by neo-colonial practices, postcolonial history and art itself.
Mehmood has shown nationally and internationally over the past two decades. His work is in collection of British Museum and Fukuoka Museum Japan. He was part of a group show titled Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration that traveled internationally and was shown at The Asian Art Museum, in San Francisco and at The Aldrich Contemporary Museum, in Connecticut. He taught at his alma mater from 2005-2017. Born in Jhelum, Mehmood lives and works in USA. He completed his MFA in Interdisciplinary Practice from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, MA, USA in 2019.
Mehmood creates settings and and situations that have the potential to become sites for participation, performance and exchange of ideas. This comes from his interest in engaging the viewers in more profound ways with the artwork and exploiting the capacity of the viewer to become a producer in the process. Once the viewers realize that they are producers too within these settings, the responses become more thoughtful and considered. Mehmood is also interested in creating interstices within these structures to have a dialogue that would not be possible otherwise.
He doesn’t bind his work within one discipline or a single concept, instead realizing ideas in concrete form with the materials that have an already established identity that corresponds to the conceptual underpinnings of the work. In Mehmood’s recent works he has used performance, interactivity, live projections, sound and mixed media to create an installation that looks into the relationship and power structures created through language with regard to colonialism.