Niilofur Farrukh
Managing Trustee – KBT & Art Critic
Niilofur Farrukh is a Karachi based art interventionist whose seminal initiatives have expanded the space for art publication, curation and public art. A longtime advocate for an interface between art and public audiences, she has curated exhibitions like “No Honor In Killing”, that toured 5 small and big towns in the country for two years. She has contributed as the Pakistan Commissioner at Tashkent Biennale, Asian Art Biennale and Kathmandu International Art Festival. In Pakistan, she co-founded ASNA and co-curated four iterations of ASNA Clay Triennials, the longest running Triennial in the country to connect to reclaim the craft-art continuum.
Niilofur co-founded NuktaArt and served as its Founder Editor for the ten years it was in publication. [2004 – 2014]. In 2017 along with a group of colleagues she established the Karachi Biennale to instrumentalize art to connect a fractured city to itself, and the world with the country’s largest international art event. She is the CEO of Karachi Biennale and Managing Trustee of the Karachi Biennale Trust. Niilofur is also the president of AICA Pakistan and has served on the International Board of the International Art Critics Association.
She has written extensively for national and international publications. Some of her books are ‘Pioneering Perspectives’ on pioneer women artists was aimed at countering the anti-women political narrative of the 1980s in her country. ‘The 70s Pakistan Radioactive Decade: An informal Cultural History of Pakistan’ co-edited with Amin Gulgee and John McCary was launched in 2019.
‘A Beautiful Despair’ a book on eminent artist Meher Afroz [edited] in 2021. At present she is researching the art history of Karachi for a book.
