Aun Raza

Content

PAKISTAN

Né à Lahore en 1983, Aun Raza est diplômé en arts multimédia du National College of Arts de Lahore. Il pratique le dessin et la peinture, avant de pratiquer et de s’épanouir en photographie : « son caractère immédiat, m’a permis de saisir ce que le professeur d’art dramatique russe Constantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) appelait la “solitude en public”. »

 Bien que son champs d’investigation soit multiple, Aun Raza privilégie le portrait et le reportage. Depuis 2010, le photographe a voyagé dans de très nombreux pays, à la rencontre de différentes cultures et modes de vie. Son travail a fait l’objet de plusieurs expositions à l’international : Yangon Photo Festival 2018 et 2015, Myanmar, Galerie QR Nuit Blanche, Bologne (2016), Angkor Photo Festival 2016 et 2015, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2014). Sa série Here Lies Lahore a été présentée dans le cadre de la biennale de photographie contemporaine Photoquai en 2015.

For the Love of Lahore

2018 Photographic Residencies

“I bring photography and voyeurism together: for me, it’s a way to read people’s diaries and share their lives – and, in particular, stolen moments. By taking photographs of situations of surrender and despair, as well as that joy whose radiance is sometimes palpable in the air, I feel like I’m capturing that moment when one holds their breath.”

Pakistan is able to provide those kinds of contradictory emotions: “exasperation and aspirations, music and tears, chaos and consolation, life and grief”. Aun Raza chose to continue his photographic project by capturing history’s last traces of a changing city. It is his home town — which he left over ten years ago — that Aun Raza decided to study closely with his camera, with distance and humour: “In Lahore, amid destruction and deterioration, there remains beauty, sweatiness and intensity in the faces, music and colours of these travellers camping by the Ravi River to whom the town owes part of its lost heritage”.

This series prolongs Here Lies Lahore, Aun Raza’s photographic diary of Lahore’s inhabitants that was displayed for the previous biennial photography exhibition Photoquai in 2015.

Series produced between 2018-2019.

Aun Raza : For the Love of Lahore

Boy photographing himself during a routine electricity breakdow
Raza Kazim
A sign exhorting citizens to be vigilant against terrorism
A pet sheep near a pillar of the very costly and incomplete overground Metro…
Kamil Khan Mumtaz
A tender moment between a religiously detested dog and a culturally admired lion
Mr Danjeras Currant
On the eve of religious celebration, a gracious blue shadow floats by a boy…
Saeed Ibrahim
Graffiti about kite-flying which has been banned
Akmal Qadri
Xi Jinping, M. A. Jinnah and Tayyab Erdogan under a bridge. With such friends,…
Qalandar Memon
A stray dog chewing fake grass in front of the founder of Pakistan
M. Asghar with his wife Taj