Kashif Nadim Chaudry, Char Bagh Exhibition Tour, Diaspora Pavilion 2: London

For ICF’s Diaspora Pavilion 2: London (2023) exhibition, Kashif Nadim Chaudry has designed the multi-work installation Char Bagh. The Char Bagh is a Persian and Indo-Persian garden design based on the four gardens of heaven mentioned in the Quran. This particular design reached its apotheosis with the Mughal empire on the Indian subcontinent in the 16th and 17th centuries. These gardens symbolised paradise on Earth, and as well as being used for monumental tombs, were also designed for pleasure.

For his installation Char Bagh, Chaudry brings together new and existing sculptural works to stage his first solo presentation in London. Spanning over ten years of his practice, these works showcase Chaudry’s long-term engagement with the colourful and sensual fabrics of South Asia, as well as his fascination with embellishment, adornment and decoration. A family heritage in tailoring has been very influential for Chaudry’s work and has focused his creativity around the importance of materiality and craftsmanship.

Chaudry’s design of the exhibition reveals the influence of art and architectural histories on his practice; while some of the references he relays are the result of a growing awareness of the intersections of his own identity, which has brought him to this particular point in his practice. Negotiating his sexuality as a gay man within different cultural and religious spheres has been a fertile ground from which Chaudry’s practice has taken root and continuously draws inspiration.

With each work in the exhibition Chaudry celebrates beauty and splendour, while provoking allusions to what lies beneath these glamorous surfaces. His introduction of architectural and kinetic elements enables him to play with scale, movement and light in new ways, and he employs humour and play to subvert traditional associations with the materials and forms he uses.

Video shot by Emmy Yoneda and edited by Joanna Risvik.

Diaspora Pavilion 2: London features two new, site-specific, solo installations by artists Sonia E Barrett and Kashif Nadim Chaudry. The exhibition was presented by ICF in collaboration with Block 336 (10 March – 10 June 2023).

The exhibition is the final iteration of a series of peripatetic events that form ICF’s Diaspora Pavilion 2 (DP2) project. This trans-national, collaborative project advances ICF’s engagement with diaspora as a critical concept following the first Diaspora Pavilion during the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. DP2 interrogates and complicates the term diaspora across various curatorial formats as part of an ongoing mapping of the rich and complex material cultures, mythologies, alternative histories and re-imagined landscapes that are born from the distinct and yet shared reality of belonging to a diaspora.

Diaspora Pavilion 2: London (2023) was made possible with support from Art Fund, Arts Council England, Henry Moore Foundation, Cockayne and London Community Foundation.