Varda Nisar
Where do museums in Pakistan fit within the larger political upheavals that the country has experienced?
Varda Nisar (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in Concordia’s Department of Art History in the Faculty of Fine Arts. She has been actively involved in centering art education and community outreach in her former role as the founder of a children's art festival in Karachi, and later as the head of educational programming for the Karachi Biennale.
Varda was a 2015-16 Arthink South Asia Fellow and worked with Spark Arts for Children as part of her secondment. In 2021, she organized and convened a speaker series titled, (Art+Micro)History: Contemporary Artistic Voices from the South, which drew attention to the specific concerns and artistic modes of resistance in Pakistan. Her current doctoral research focuses on the role that museums in Pakistan are playing in nation-building by positioning them within the global political dynamic.
