Ibrahim Quraishi (born 1973) belongs to a new generation of makers challenging our understanding of visual performativity and it’s relationship to the broader cultural perspective. As one of the recipients of the first Prix Jardin d’Europe Prize in 2008 for his Installation Islamic Violins at Kunsthalle, Wien, Quraishi consciously examines the dynamics of "migration", dispossession and cohabitation within the highly rigid socio-political spheres of imagined communities inside the contours of the visual arts context, while freely playing with the tensions between the complexity of the real and our longing for simplicity. Defined by a nomadic existence, Quraishi divides his time between New York, Lahore and Amsterdam.

For his solo presentation at Lumen Travo Gallery, Quraishi presents, DREAMING Arizona (2009) and Islamic Violins (2008).

DREAMING Arizona,a series of works realised in Amsterdam after several months of research in the United States, particularly in Arizona, Texas, Utah and Colorado. Quraishi explores the American landscape, where cowboys once reigned. He questions the modern day notion of power and masculinity, related to former vigilantes, whose image is embedded in the common global imaginary of the Arizona landscape.

Quraishi’s work, DREAMING Arizona (2009) gives the viewer a multiple view point, or metaphoric journey through legendary Highway 64. The seven part video work exposes the end of cowboyism through showing the empty, illusionary world of this iconographic landscape. Quraishi also shows “manipulated” images of the American landscape as a spacial analysis. The artist erases elements of the familiar landscape in order to endulge in the different and specific elements, which we associate with hyper- masculinity. What he leaves behind,exposes the last remains of the cowboy.

“What is left of the melancholy songs and those legendary lonely nights on an empty highway? Farewell cowboys, the world doesn’t need you anymore.”

Islamic Violins(2008) questions the notion of violence and it’s relationship to objectification of ideologies and actual performing bodies as a cumulative phenomena. Quraishi has done several performance-based explosions of “Islamic Violins” in many parts of the world and at Lumen Travo presents the remains collected from these explosive performances.