The first edition of the VXR Festival, a festival dedicated to virtual and extended reality art, opened to a full house at Alliance Française de Lahore on Sunday. The festival, titled Between the Prompts // V.1, brings together artists, creative practitioners, and audiences to explore the intersection of art, technology, and immersive experiences. It features the work of 70 artists from Pakistan, Spain, France, Canada, the United States, and other countries, and it uses virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and extended reality (XR) to present art in a way that goes beyond a conventional gallery visit.
The festival is presented with the support of the Embassy of France in Pakistan, Alliance Française de Lahore, the Institut français, the Embassy of Spain in Pakistan, and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), in collaboration with UNESCO. It has been curated by Dr Najamul Assar and Sarah Rajper, with Zainab Aamir as the assistant curator. The Lahore programme runs from November 8 to 11 across four venues, which are Alliance Française de Lahore, the National College of Arts, R Space, and Beaconhouse National University, so that visitors can see the works in both cultural and academic spaces of the city.
Visitors experience the artworks through VR headsets, screens, and augmented reality, instead of viewing them on walls. One of the main attractions is a Claude Monet VR experience, which is being presented in Pakistan for the first time through the collection of the Institut français. The programme also brings classical storytelling and hand-drawn illustrations into virtual and augmented reality, including Urdu dastan, which connects a traditional form of narration with new technology. These works show how artists in the country are using immersive tools to retell cultural stories and to create new experiences for audiences who may be trying VR for the first time.
After the Lahore programme, the festival will travel to Islamabad, where it will run from November 13 to 15 and give audiences in the capital another chance to see the VR and XR installations. The VXR Festival is an initiative of the team behind the Lahore Digital Arts Festival, which has been supporting digital art and creative technology in Pakistan since 2019. With artists from several countries taking part and two cities on the schedule, the festival offers an early look at how immersive art is developing locally, and it gives visitors a hands-on way to understand what virtual and extended reality can do for creative work.
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