Aziz Sohail
Aziz Sohail
Aziz Sohail is a Pakistan-passport holding curator and writer whose work builds interdisciplinary connections between art, history, archives, literature, theory, and biography and supports new cultural and pedagogical infrastructures. Their research and resultant projects honour and recognise the power of queer and feminist collectivity, sociability, joy, and wayward encounter and unfold through slowness, collaboration, and tentacularity.
From 2020-2023, with The Many Headed Hydra, they co-led a language where yesterday are the same word. Kal., a trans-oceanic platform supporting practices enacting queer pasts/futures and de-colonial ecologies in South Asia and post-migrant Europe. The platform had residencies and presentations in Berlin, Karachi, Colombo and Philadelphia as well as a radio channel and a series of workshops and publications.
Aziz’s other projects include Specters of Sultana: A Speculative History of Subcontinental Science (2025), at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, co-organised with Promona Sengupta and Aziza Ahmed; The World that Belongs to Us (2023), at The New Art Gallery Walsall, England; Archival Intimacies: Queering South/East Asian Diasporas (2022), at the ONE Archives/USC Pacific Asia Museum, Los Angeles, co-organised with Alexis Bard Johnson; and Very Very Sweet Medina: Artistic Innovation in 1990s Karachi (2019) at the Sharjah Art Foundation, co-organised with Bani Abidi. They serve the inaugural Next Wave Arts Advisory for 2026. Previously Aziz was on the 2025 Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) Advisory Committee and on the advisory for the 2024 Creative Time Summit. In 2024, they were the Monash University Curator-in-Residence, researching and presenting the project To Forever Ebb and Flow: Queer Time/Migrant Time.
Aziz has written widely on contemporary art, both as commissioned essays for exhibition catalogues, artist monographs and academic journals, as well as reviews and thought-pieces, including for DAWN in Pakistan, ArtGuide Australia and unprojects, and globally for Mousse, Aperture and Canvas, amongst others. They have given and moderated talks and events globally including at Singapore Art Museum, SOAS (London), Stanford University, Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), Paul Mellon Center (London), Prince Claus Fund and the University of California, Santa Barbara They have been part of residencies and workshops with Cornell University, Ithaca (2017), Khoj, New Delhi (2018), the Nepal Picture Library (2019), Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin (2019), ICA Philadelphia/Raw Material Company, Dakar (2022), T:>Works, Singapore (2024) and PhotoKathmandu (2025). From 2015-2018, they worked with organisations such as the British Council and the Lahore Biennale Foundation to build new cultural initiatives and spaces in Pakistan. Their practice was supported by a multi-year grant from the Asian Cultural Council, New York (2019-2022) and their global projects have received funding from a range of sources including the British Council, Goethe-Institut, Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Gwaertler Stiftung and the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.
Aziz holds a BA in Art History from Brandeis University, Waltham (2009-2013) and an MFA in Art (Critical and Curatorial Studies) from the University of California, Irvine (2018-2021). They are currently a PhD Candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash University working on 'We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other: Queer Curating as Making Kin in South Asia and its diaspora(s)'. As part of their PhD, they founded the residential programme Queer Unschool South Asia, which has organised two editions in Nepal in 2024 and 2026.
Headshot courtesy: Halik Abdul Azeez