How to Become a Rock

Fazal Rizvi
With Paulina Ruiz Carballido, Faheem Abbas, and Mujeeb Ruzik

Exhibition
Aug. 30-Oct. 8, 2026

Lecture and reception
Sept. 15, 2026, 5:30 p.m.

The Gallery at VCUarts Qatar is pleased to present How to Become a Rock, by artist Fazal Rizvi. Employing diverse media including sculpture, video, sound, drawing, and text, the exhibition reflects on the limits of the self and the body as the artist and his collaborators engage the land, materiality, and tectonic forces that shape the imposing Karakoram mountains of Pakistan, India, and China.

Dramatic landforms produced through geological scales of time and pressure offer a poetic foil for human temporality and fragility. “How,” the artist asks, “can we embody and understand these formations, their slowness, their outward stillness, their weight, their bearing, their surfaces, and what lies within them? How can we see them in a likeness to ourselves, and ourselves in a likeness to them?” 

Through explorations of closeness and distance, sameness and difference, movement and rest, the exhibition raises important questions about the boundaries, continuities, and entanglements between the human body and ecological bodies. How do people and the land mark and instruct one another? How do we understand the agencies, intimacies, and accountabilities of each toward the other? 

Featured collaborators include Paulina Ruiz Carballido, Faheem Abbas, and Mujeeb Ruzik.

How to Become a Rock was originally commissioned for Lahore Biennale 03 – Of Mountains and Seas, curated by John Tain, with support from the French Embassy in Pakistan. 

Photo caption and credits:
Fazal Rizvi, still from Carriers, 2024. Video, sound, 11:12 min.
Music by Mujeeb Ruzik. Courtesy of the artist.

Fazal Rizvi is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Karachi. His enquiry rests somewhere between the personal, the social and the political. Having spent a few years thinking about the materiality and immateriality of the sea and its borders, Rizvi also returns to the personal and familial as a place of trigger, and has been contemplating the ideas of mourning, remembering, memorializing and monument making. Since 2020, the artist has also been engaged with a long-term research project focusing on the glacial and mountainous terrain in the north of Pakistan. After graduating from the National College of Arts, Lahore (2010), he was an artist-in-residence at Arcus Studios, Japan (2011). He received the Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust award for the Gasworks Studios Residency, London (2014); he has participated in residencies at Pro Helvetia New Delhi in Zurich (2020); Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (2020–2021); and Cité des Arts Paris, with Institute Francaise (2023).

b. 1987, Karachi, Pakistan / Lives and works in Pakistan