ISLAMABAD (The Thursday Times) — The VXR Festival, a travelling showcase of virtual and extended reality art, opened its Islamabad edition on Friday, taking headsets and immersive works by Pakistani and foreign artists to art students in Rawalpindi in the morning and to diplomats and gallery-goers at the Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) in the evening.
The edition, titled “Between the Prompts v2,” follows the festival’s week-long run in Lahore. It continues through the weekend at Alliance Française d’Islamabad before moving on to Karachi. Organised by the team behind the Lahore Digital Arts Festival, VXR has no permanent venue and is designed to travel between cities.
The day opened at the National College of Arts in Rawalpindi with a session featuring the artists Asma Kazmi from the United States, Faqeha Nadeem and Zarin Gul from Pakistan, Lola Zoido from Spain, and Sandrine Daumier and Marie Lienhard from France. Students from Fatima Jinnah Women University and other institutions attended, along with children from the Muskan Orphanage House.
French Ambassador Jean-Noël Poirier inaugurated the evening exhibition at the PNCA, where the council’s director general, Ayoub Jamali, welcomed guests. French Cultural Attaché Zakaria Haffar also attended.
“Extended reality usually reaches us as a finished product, built elsewhere and sold here,” said festival director Dr Najam Ul Assar. “This edition asks what happens when artists from Rawalpindi, Lahore, Paris, Madrid and Berkeley take hold of the medium, and the headset becomes a space for memory, critique and play rather than consumption.”
“Watching art students at NCA in the morning and diplomats at PNCA in the evening step into the same works told us this question belongs here,” he said.
Co-curator Sarah Rajper said each city on the festival’s route shapes the show. “Each city we travel to becomes part of the curatorial conversation,” she said. “At PNCA, we wanted Islamabad audiences to experience immersive art not as something imported from elsewhere, but as a shared space where artists from here and abroad explore questions of memory, presence and belonging.”
The festival, curated by Assar and Rajper with assistant curator Zainab Amir, brings together about 70 artists. Tülin Khalid of Alliance Française d’Islamabad described the programme as an invitation to look “between the lines” of the technology.
