Speaking to Dawn’s Fatima Attarwala on the podcast All Things Money, she said the problem with Pakistan’s art scene was not a lack of talent — there was enough to go around — there just weren’t that many patrons of contemporary artists.

“We have no dearth of artists. We have no dearth of good artists. We have a dearth of awareness of the arts. We have a dearth of patronage of the arts,” Raja said.

She said the public’s idea of art around the world had changed substantially in the 21st century, but it remained somewhat stagnant in Pakistan, including in diaspora Pakistanis, who changed with the world in all other aspects, but still wanted to see the Pakistan of yore in art.

“They’re still looking for that little piece of Pakistan that they left behind 40 years back, a street scene, a rickshaw, wires, the Thari women, the swirling dervishes — which were never part of our history — [and] calligraphy, which is really not our strength. And they’re still looking for that because I think they want to prove or retain that part of Pakistaniyat.”

She said part of the problem was how we treat art as a society. She said when children are in school, great emphasis is placed on them studying and excelling in science and maths, while art is treated as a “stepchild”.

Raja said that while society may see art as unimportant, it actually helps people with their “physical and mental well-being”.

These attitudes, she said, have resulted in people not having awareness about and access to the art scene. The curator pointed out that Karachi, the country’s largest urban centre, did not have an art museum, which is what led to even the city’s more educated echelons not being familiar with art.

“Until people see art in the public sphere, how would they become aware of it? That’s why you’re still living in the rickshaws and the telephone wires and the electricity wires and, you know, the Thari women,” she said.

As for what can be done, Raja said raising awareness was especially important, but it must be done by people from the field, not bureaucrats and government workers. She said people with relevant knowledge telling others about art might eventually get the public and private sectors to work together to promote the arts.

The private sector, she said, was especially important to this in a Pakistani context because the government of a developing country had more urgent issues to solve. The state could, however, contribute in other ways.

“Our issues are roti, kapda aur makaan, (food, clothing and housing,) right? So, I would never actually ask the government to put in money into an art project, because I think that is something that they can avoid doing. They should only be facilitating the process. They should be working with the school syllabus, because that they can do.”

The curator said there were success stories of private sector interest advancing art in developing countries, including examples from India and Bangladesh.

“They have foundations, they have trusts, which are all private people. So, they have the vision… because there’s wealth there. There is wealth over here also, but it’s just that the wealthy over here are not culturally inclined.”

She said one major difference was that Pakistanis were not yet comfortable with their cultural identity like their neighbours. Raja hoped that, if the people of Pakistan can move out of that discomfort, they’d begin appreciating art for all the good it brings into their lives.

Alongside three Chinese painters, they embarked on a journey from Beijing’s Forbidden City to the scenic mountains and seas of Fujian. Throughout their travels, they created art and built friendships, culminating in a collaborative scroll painting titled ‘A Journey of Mountains and Seas, A Journey in Song’, as well as individual masterpieces. This artistic expedition became a dialogue between civilisations, expressed through five distinct colors.

White: the philosophy of blank space

Algerian artist Yasser Ameur delved into the significance of white in traditional Chinese ink painting. Guided by Chinese painter Zhang Qiuju in Fuzhou, he learned that “leaving blank space isn’t emptiness; it’s an invitation for imagination”. The two artists exchanged paintings, forging a friendship across mountains and rivers.

Red: echoes of ancient civilisations

Egyptian artist Moha­med Sabry Bastawy Hass­­an chose red as the focal colour of his work. From the majestic Forbidden Ci­­ty to the intricate art of glove puppetry, he found a shared spiritual essence. His piece, ‘The Tree of Life’, uses Chinese red to cleverly merge ancient Egy­ptian script with the Chin­ese auspicious number eight.

Originally published in Dawn, September 21st, 2026

Toor, 42, was mentioned in the Icons section. The list features painters, photographers, sculptors, and other artists as well as curators, lawyers, philanthropists, museum leaders, and others who bring artwork to the world.

The magazine describes his work as paintings of “young brown men in states of convergence and of isolation” in different settings.

It noted that since his breakthrough show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2020, he has seen his paintings sold at auction for more than $1 million, toured a solo exhibition to four museums, participated in the Venice Biennale, and sold out a two-part gallery show.

His first solo European exhibition, the publication noted, will open at the Courtauld Gallery in London in October.

This is not the first time Toor has been honoured by TIME — in 2021 he was named on the TIME100 Next list. The artist was born in Lahore and now lives in New York City.

Cover by Murtaza Ali/ White Star

Max’s visions — often influenced by his love of astronomy — were everywhere in the ’60s and ‘70s and almost as much a part of the decade’s youth culture as sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. They were like artistic renderings of an acid trip and were, in the vernacular of the time, really groovy.

The colours were vibrant and the images surreal — cosmic landscapes and starbursts, doves and floating peace symbols, kaleidoscopic butterflies, puffy clouds and other flower-power imagery. Rock stars such as the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger were Max’s portrait subjects, as well as his friends.

Former president Ronald Reagan was a fan and Max donated a painting of the Statue of Liberty to the Reagan Presidential Library.

“His decorative posters show Max to be a visionary fascinated by time, space and evolution,” a 1967 Village Voice critique said. “A psychedelic skyline prophesises the day when skyscrapers may be temples, when the Rockefeller Centre’s Rainbow Room may be used for meditation.”

Max died in a hospital in Manhattan and is survived by his daughter Libra and son Adam.

“My father was my best friend,” his daughter said in a statement. “I feel incredibly blessed to have been so deeply loved and to be his daughter.

“I hope that alongside his remarkable artistic legacy, people will remember his kindness, his gentleness, and how much he genuinely cherished putting joy into the world,” she said.

Monumental explosion

In his prime, Max mixed art and commerce as easily as he combined colours on canvas. He licensed his work for some 70 products and it ended up on airliners, cruise ships, bed sheets, eyeglasses, women’s swimsuits, chess boards and more.

“Such an explosion was monumental,” Max told Reuters in 2007. “I could have never gotten that kind of explosion just being in galleries.”

To those who said he was a sell-out, Max said he was simply finding outlets for his artistic zeal. He told The New York Times that if Matisse and Picasso were still around, they too would be trying to rush the market.

“In our era, if an artist is not seen in the media, he doesn’t exist,” Max told The Times. “The myth that an artist is not pure if he makes money is the wrong myth… What have I got to apologise for? I make art people can afford. And that makes them happy.”

Marketing machine

As the ’60s ended, Max fell out of the public eye, concentrating on working privately and travelling. He came back with a gallery show in New York in 1987 and again became a marketing machine.

He experimented with different styles and what emerged was more impressionistic in nature. His works would include portraits of music stars, the Statue of Liberty, presidents and world leaders, including a 40-part series of the Soviet Union’s then-leader Mikhail Gorbachev. He was the official artist for five Super Bowls, the 1994 World Cup, the 2006 US Winter Olympics team and the 2000 Kentucky Derby.

Max even painted a Boeing 777 for Continental Airlines, a ship for Norwegian Cruise Line and a race car for NASCAR star Dale Earnhardt. In 2000, he went on the cable television shopping network QVC to hawk his posters.

His New York studio would grow to have more than 100 employees in the 2000s and generate annual sales of $80 million to $100 million. The studio sold many of his works through cruise ship auctions, The Times reported.

Shaping the 1960s

Peter Max Finkelstein was born in Berlin on October 19, 1937, and lived in China and Israel before his family settled in New York City. In art school, he studied realism, which did not come through in his work, and started an award-winning design studio with a partner before setting out on his own to help shape the 1960s.

Max said he was thrilled when former president Bill Clinton told him that Max posters had adorned his dormitory room walls during his college years. Decades later, a series of Max portraits of Clinton hung in the Clinton presidential library.

In 1997, Max was accused of concealing $1.1 million in sales of his work and pleaded guilty to tax evasion. He was sentenced to two months in a halfway house and community service, which included helping children with art projects.

The Times reported in May 2019 that Max had been diagnosed with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and had advanced dementia. At that point, the newspaper reported, he had not painted seriously in four years.

Max, who was a vegan and yoga devotee, was married twice.

The sell-out display, which opened to the public on Thursday, has sparked a Bayeux craze across Britain, with newspapers producing special guides, online discussions about securing tickets, and the pub opposite the museum temporarily changing its name to ‘The Beer Tapestry’.

The masterpiece will be shown at the museum in central London for the next 10 months, having left France for the first time since the 11th century. It depicts the Norman invasion of England in 1066, the most famous date in the nation’s history.

“It’s just magical, isn’t it?” said Pauline Gairey, 53, a finance professional who had travelled from Wales, and recalled studying the tapestry at school. Scenes from inside the museum showed staff dressed in medieval battle dress with helmets, shields and swords, in another sign of Bayeux mania.

The 70-metre-long tapestry is being displayed in a bespoke glass case, with ticket holders allotted 40 minutes to view it from an elevated platform, before heading do­­­­­­­­­w­­n some stairs to view the stitching up close.

“It’s amazing that the colour is still so vivid…it’s amazing it’s survived so well and so long,” said Richard Samuel, 60, a solicitor, coming out of the exhibition.

Originally published in Dawn, September 11th, 2026

Dressed in deceptively simple white, visually, she is the antithesis of the images she creates: quiet, humble and unassuming, with little about her suggesting the extroversion of her chosen creative language. And yet, crystals have come to define that language  — first superimposed onto two-dimensional images, transforming the ordinary and imperfect into something luminous, and now taking physical form in elaborate sculptures and installations.

We meet at a dinner hosted by The Legend of Maula Jatt producer and art connoisseur Ammara Hikmat in Lahore, whose home, with its quirky interior, offers the perfect backdrop to creative conversations.

Shakeel is in Lahore for You Can See Through Me, an exhibition of her new work. We sit down to talk about her art, which is hugely feminist and intends to shape conversations around womanhood, body image and, tying it all in, spirituality.

Are you celebrating what we would conventionally call imperfections, or are you changing the perception of how we see things, I ask.

“The latter,” she responds without hesitation. “I think there is no such thing as an imperfection. For me, everything is beautiful in God’s eyes and if it was made that way, then who are we to say that it’s imperfect? I’m just kind of changing the way we should look at certain things.”

She speaks of her breakthrough collection, Glitter my Stretch Marks, the immediate success of which catapulted her career as a visionary artist almost a decade ago.

“The stretch marks artwork was the turning point for me,” she remembers, sharing a concept that has now become a very dynamic page. “I had done crystal lipsticks, my first work, and this kind of work was never done before. So I’m the first artist in the world who actually came up with superimposing crystals on 2D images.”

What inspired her to turn stretch marks into the subject for artwork?

I wanted to reinforce that in order to love anything else, you need to first start loving yourself. That is something that I like to show with figures, especially women figures. You cannot love anyone till you genuinely love yourself.

“I remember I was taking pictures of one of my friends, and she’s petite. She had stretch marks. I thought to myself, she’s so small, so why does she have stretch marks? I have stretch marks. I used to feel ashamed of them but when I saw hers, I saw them in a whole new light. Till then I felt maybe I’m the only one who has stretch marks, or maybe only big girls have them. And I filled them up with crystals. I posted the image on Instagram and it resonated with so many people. People started sending in their pictures with stretch marks, scars, burns, and all kinds of markings. There were people who had self-harmed and wanted to tell their story without revealing their identity. 

“I wanted to reinforce that in order to love anything else, you need to first start loving yourself. That is something that I like to show with figures, especially women figures. You cannot love anyone till you genuinely love yourself.”

Originally pursuing a career in medicine, Shakeel’s transition from the world of science to art seemed almost instinctive.

“As a dentist, I was healing a physical pain. And I loved it. I generally like this process of giving. And art did a similar thing but with emotions, with feelings, with empathy and with human connection. It happened on a very spiritual level.”

Shakeel’s story is one of hope and dreams. She remembers how she started making collages before she even knew what the word meant.

“I had a broken laptop and I didn’t have the courage to ask my parents to buy me a new laptop. I had a Samsung Note 3 stylus pen and I started cutting and pasting a lot of images together. I remember I started posting on Instagram and someone commented and said, ‘This is the worst collage ever’. I was like, okay, I agree. But what is a collage?

“I did not even know what a collage was back then but I was making collages. I got 23 likes on the first collage I posted on Instagram and felt like I had made it!”

Her love for crystals came from her grandmother’s curio cabinet full of crystal figurines — the kind most millennials will remember from their childhood: the crystal rabbits and hedgehogs and deer that grandmothers loved to collect.  

“It was so mesmerising to see them catch the light; the movement of light always caught my attention.”

As luck would have it, it also started catching the attention of some very famous people.

“I was in London, exhibiting my first installation, The Great Supper, when I got a message from him on Instagram,” she narrated her surprise interaction with Chance the Rapper. “He was like, Sara, I have been trying to find you for a very long time. He asked for my number and called me about a picture of a crystal disc I had made. He said he had been holding on to it for two months. He wanted me to design his whole album cover. He didn’t even know me, but he knew my work. And in God’s special way, he found me.”

Since then, her distinctive visual language has found a global audience, leading to collaborations with some of the world’s most recognisable names — from Lancôme, Bobbi Brown, La Mer and Victoria’s Secret to Jimmy Choo, Mercedes-Benz and Amazon. 

Despite the maximalism of her artwork, Shakeel is a very private, quiet person. In this digital age, artists and creators consciously or subconsciously build profiles on Instagram and have very public personas, but this artist lets her work speak for her. 

“I am a very private person in general,” she agrees. “I’m a very malang, a clumsy and relaxed person. I know that people have certain expectations from artists and celebrities but I kind of don’t care about that. I think people connect with my art more than me but when they meet me, they say the picture is complete. They say that meeting me helps make sense of everything that I make.”

She admits that her work is a fantasy, a bubble that she lives in that is protected from politics and the harshness of life. This resonates in various artworks. Particularly striking is the series of artworks she made on Ariana Grande.

“I’ve never met her and I don’t know her personally but her music is beautiful,” Shakeel says. “I noticed all the hate she was getting and didn’t like it. She’s so uplifting, every interview you get to see is so positive. How can you hate someone like that? This series was my special way of seeing her sparkling,” she explains.

“I like to see good in things in life and the good in people, no matter what the circumstances are. And I kind of want to share that light and hope with people through my art.”

Shakeel is very clear in her guiding light being Allah, and the spirituality that guides her through her life and work. She’s also very clear about the intention behind her work, which is to spread hope and positivity. In her world, there is no room for negativity and darkness. 

“God made us beautiful in so many ways,” she says, “and through my work I do want to focus on the beauty of female bodies, female minds. I think we are more than just bodies. I think we are an extremely intelligent species that is hugely untapped. It’s not been fully explored. Women in general, I personally think, are always fighting. We are in fight mode. We are trying to prove ourselves. I think a calm woman has never been explored. I’m looking for that calmness.”

This ethos reflects in all her work, from the recreation of world flags to one of her most ambitious projects to date, The Jewel System, which took her work decisively from the digital into the physical realm. Commissioned by Swire Properties for Arts Month 2025 in Hong Kong, the installation reimagined the solar system through folklore and mythology, its vast planetary forms embellished with 3.9 million crystals and some 40 million hand-embroidered stitches. Instead of outsourcing the embroideries, Shakeel worked for three months with a team of 80 artisans in Pakistan, bringing centuries-old techniques traditionally associated with ornate textiles and bridal wear, into magnificent celestial sculptures.

“They now call me a phygital artist because I combine physical and digital worlds,” she laughs.

Is she at all worried about AI and its influence on art?

“Oh I love AI,” she says with utmost clarity. “People find technology scary but I personally consider it a friend, and a friend that has no ego and is willing to work with me in the middle of the night. For a person like me who has 500 ideas in one go, AI really helps me bring them together. Honestly, it’s about using it to your advantage and understanding that it’s not fulfilling anything completely. It’s just a part of the process.”

The KBT called for proposals in an Instagram post on Thursday to be considered for their EBM Emerging Artist Prize. The winner will be given an award at the opening of the Biennale as well as a commission to realise their proposal, which will be displayed at KB27. The deadline to submit proposals is 11:59pm on September 20.

The theme for the prize is Sediments: Realising Futures, which explores how “memories, ecologies, technologies, trade, communities and collective energies accumulate over time to shape future realities”.

This falls under the umbrella of the Biennale’s overarching main theme: Kal, Yesterday, Tomorrow. Artists are encouraged to apply “ambitious interdisciplinary practices incorporating sound, moving image, digital media, installation, participation, responsive technologies, and public interaction”.

Per the eligibility requirements, aspirants should be Pakistani visual and interdisciplinary artists under 35 years of age with a minimum of five years of sustained artistic practice. They are also required to have studied “a recognised art, design, architecture, media, or related creative discipline” or “demonstrate an equivalent level of professional artistic practice”.

Interested artists may submit a proposal for a site-specific indoor or open-air work which incorporates “visual, spatial, material, digital, sound, performative, interactive, participatory, technological or interdisciplinary approaches”. Organisers have encouraged aspirants to interpret the term “sediment” broadly and not limit the concept to geological material.

Proposals should describe the artwork’s relation to the theme, its technical specifications, site and material requirements, a detailed budget, a production timeline and plans for installation and de-installation.

The winner will be selected based on a number of criteria, including, strength and originality of the artwork, connection to the theme, quality and relevance of the artist’s practice, the artist’s approach to sustainability and overall feasibility.

KB27 will take place from January 16 to 31 at different sites across Karachi. The exhibition is the fifth since the Karachi Biennale was first held in 2017. Noor Ahmed, a former general manager of the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, is serving as curator — the second woman to have held the position.

Cover photo: Karachi Biennale/Instagram

“I’m used to doing the impossible. This one almost broke my will,” Lucas said as he offered reporters a first glimpse inside, ahead of the museum’s official opening on September 22.

Lucas, 82, has described the complex built with his wife and business partner, Mellody Hobson, as the “people’s temple of art.”

“Part of the problem is I’m a contrarian. I don’t like to do things that people think can be done,” he added. “I’m fascinated by doing things that people say can’t be done.” The futuristic-looking museum was built on what used to be a parking lot next to the University of Southern California, the filmmaker’s alma mater.

That personal connection, combined with Los Angeles’s place at the heart of American cinema, made it the ideal home for the project, executive director Tracey Bates told AFP.

At the entrance, visitors are greeted by the yellow Naboo N-1 starfighter from Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999), but with more than 9,300 square metres of exhibition space, the offerings go far beyond the beloved saga.

Its more than 30 galleries feature works by artists including Banksy, Frida Kahlo, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White and Robert Colescott; comics by Winsor McCay, Jack Kirby and Frank Frazetta; and illustrations by Norman Rockwell, Jessie Willcox Smith and NC Wyeth.

“Narrative art is stories that are illustrated,” Bates said. “A story that you can see a picture in one frame, and it doesn’t need further explanation.” Lucas said he wanted to highlight the work of illustrators.

“A picture is very powerful, and the stories are very powerful, and you combine them together, and those two elements create a society,” he said.

“And that’s why I wanted to build this, because, you know, narrative art creates a group of people with a common belief system, and that common belief system allows them to work together, not kill each other.” The museum’s unusual design — a green roof that blends into the surrounding landscape — is meant to offer a glimpse of the future and spark visitors’ curiosity, said Ma Yansong, the architect behind the project.

“We want to make architecture look futuristic and make people curious. What is it?” Yansong said.

“Some people say this is a spaceship. Some people say this is a cloud, but that makes people curious. What’s in there? They want to discover on their own.”

Born Indu Chatterjee in Lahore in 1929, she belonged to a Bengali Brahmin family that had converted to Christianity.

At the time of Partition, her family moved to Delhi, where she earned a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Delhi University and also learnt Bharatanatyam, a classical dance with roots in Tamil Nadu.

In 1951, she moved back to Pakistan after marrying Captain Aboobaker Osman Mitha, who later became a major general in the Pakistan Army. Here, she travelled across the country with her husband, and wherever she found herself, she performed and taught classical dance.

From Lahore Grammar School, where she taught dance, to her own Mazmoon-i-Shauq academy, she taught her craft to anyone who cared to learn.

Indu adapted themes that resonated with her audience and worked with Urdu poetry and music. She brought Bharatanatyam out of temples where it originated and beyond the musical and linguistic traditions that had defined this ancient dance. She even reimagined this classical dance form to include secular and feminist ideas.

Indu mentored thousands of young artists over the course of her eventful life and stood out as “the voice of the artist” in a country where art is often undervalued. She showed up for the arts and championed key causes, but she was also discerning in who she chose to mentor and support.

Indu was also the subject of How She Moves, a documentary by her students that celebrated classical dance and music. Similarly, Theatre Wallay in Islamabad shared some of her stories in This Stained Dawn, a 2015 theatre production bringing together stories of Partition.

In the generosity of spirit that was her hallmark, Indu shared her memories and stories of her father, Professor Chatterjee, a professor of philosophy at Government College Lahore, for this production.

In 2020, the Government of Pakistan awarded her the Presidential Pride of Performance for her contribution to the arts.

Fizza Hasan, director of Theatre Wallay, said Indu Mitha embodied the true spirit of an artist who never allowed age or circumstance diminish her engagement with the arts.

She said: “At a time when the arts and cultural spaces are increasingly fragile, Indu refused to let them fade away. She kept showing up, as an artist, a mentor, a storyteller and an audience member. Her life reminded younger artists that art is not something one simply does; it is a way of remaining engaged with the world and with other people.”

Arjumand Faisel, a gallerist, said Indu’s presence was a gift of nature. “She radiated warmth and positive energy, stimulated the mind, filled the heart with joy, and brought a quiet sense of peace to the soul.”

Her legacy lives on through her daughter Tehreema Mitha, who posted about the demise of her mother in a Facebook post on August 31. A dancer and choreographer herself, Tehreema described her mother as a beloved wife, mother, nani and guru who gave her love — and her joy of dance — unconditionally to so many.

Originally published in Dawn, September 2nd, 2026

On Tuesday, a Facebook account appearing to belong to Tehreema posted, “Beloved wife, mother, nani, dadi and guru Indu Mitha passed away today, 31st August, 2026, in Dublin, Ireland. She gave her unconditional love to so many along with her love and joy of dance!”

Born to a Bengali Christian family in Lahore in 1929, Indu moved to Delhi along with her parents at Partition, where she learnt Bharatanatyam — a form of classical dance originating in India’s Tamil Nadu.

She taught dance in India before getting married and moving to Pakistan in 1951, where she continued taking disciples for decades — well into her 80s. She was awarded the Presidential Award for Pride of Performance in 2020 for her services to the arts.

Indu was the subject of the critically acclaimed documentary How She Moves in 2021, which followed her and her students as they prepared for her last dance recital before retirement.

The teacher later chastised the filmmakers for expressing their own ideas about her work rather than presenting it as it was. She said the documentary was not reflective of her own ideas or representative of her.

Tehreema carries on her legacy as a dancer and guru, with Indu once describing her daughter as “my pride and joy, and the heir to my dance legacy”.

Her daughter was, in Indu’s own words, “my only student fully qualified to teach my style”.

Now based in the US, Tehreema continues to live up to those wishes as a choreographer and dancer. She runs her own productions under the name Tehreema Mitha Dance Company.

Cover photo: Tehreema Mitha/Facebook

In Lahore, she held a solo exhibition at Remix Café, Gulberg, the other day, featuring artworks where X-rays, glitter and gemstones were put together to show the artist’s distinct artistic language.

The exhibition, titled You Can See Through Me, displayed 25 artworks of Sara who explored themes of love, feminism, beauty and spirituality. The title of the event hinted at the themes focused on personal self of the artist as well as her philosophy.

An artwork showed two human figures hugging each other, almost kissing while crystals of various colours like pink, green, blue, amber, purple and gold illuminated the energy of their subjective selves. The X-ray like image studded with colourful gemstones and crystals signified the inner human beauty as well as intimacy but at the same time, it could also symbolise rising materialism in the contemporary world and how it could impact human connection, love and relationships.

Another artwork showed a couple hugging each other, again with abundant use of crystals and gemstones, showing the beauty of love and relationships. The skeletal image expanded the message of the work and opened it for more interpretations beyond gender, age and ethnicity.

Feminism appears to be one of the major themes of Sara Shakeel. An artwork in the exhibition showed a middle finger to the world, focusing on rebellious nature of the art. But this image also had gemstones, crystals and jewellery which diluted the aggressiveness from rebellion and added beauty to it. It also brought feminism into play as the middle finger showed what the world or society meant to the artist. The theme of feminism was explored in other works on display in the exhibition, including one showing motherhood and pregnancy, again symbolising continuity of human life and beauty of motherhood through crystals and gemstones. Female skeletal figures featured in yet another artwork in black and white but in this work, crystals were replaced by flowers. The group of women in a work showed sisterhood with preservations of individual self at the same time. Yet another artwork took the viewers to the theme of motherhood with babies in the womb and flowers in a female body, once again celebrating life and its continuity. The theme of feminism was reinforced by another image of stiletto, symbolizing power and assertiveness.

Spirituality is yet another theme explored by Sara Shakeel but here too, she continues exploring spiritual self without leaving her signature style. The black background brought the light of gemstones and crystals into the focus, making the message clearer.

Other artworks on display in the exhibition featured human body parts like hand, feet, and skull all made to look dazzling and less grim with plentiful use of crystals and gemstones.

Use of gemstones and crystals is the signature style of Sara Shakeel which makes her works stand out with all their naked beauty. The x-ray of faceless images broaden the scope of the artworks to represent larger human life than any particular facial features could do. The technique gives Sara’s art more universal appeal beyond race, ethnicity or nationality and anybody can relate to it, beyond borders. It also focuses on the internal self, emphasising spirituality. Most of the artworks in the exhibition had black background that shifted more focus on the message in the artworks as well as their colours, contrasting colourful crystals with darkness.

Sara’s art has been displayed in the UK, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong and other countries. She has collaborated with Chance the Rapper for his debut album, showing that her journey is moving beyond visual art. She has been featured in Vogue magazine.

Sara, now based in London, was pursuing dentistry when she started exploring art with use of crystals and sparkles and started sharing it on her Instagram profile. She drew widespread attention that took her to places and a different course of life. She is now known as “Queen of Crystals” or “crystal artist”.

The exhibition was curated by Laila Premjee and Silah Saigol of LP Art Consultancy.

Originally published in Dawn, August 31st, 2026

In a matter of minutes, our surroundings can be transformed by sudden change. A clear blue sky can turn an ominous grey and no two sunsets hold quite the same spectrum of hues in their brief, theatrical passage from day into night. To grasp these subtle occurrences requires a heightened level of sensitivity, an attentiveness to the world that allows one to recognise the miraculous in the seemingly ordinary.

A person sensitive enough to perceive these fleeting wonders is almost incapable of keeping the feelings they evoke contained. It is this heightened sensitivity to the fleeting and the ordinary that lies at the heart of Siddiqua Bilgrami’s artistic creations. For Bilgrami, movement is intrinsic to life, and space is what makes movement possible, so nature and space become both her tools and her subjects. According to her, “Colour reflects feeling, while line reflects thought. They are ways of putting passing thoughts and feelings into my work over the years.”

That same sense of movement has carried through Bilgrami’s own life. Born into a Deccani family, she studied at the Government College of Arts and Architecture in Hyderabad Deccan before travelling to Rome on an Italian government scholarship. There, she studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, trained in ceramics at Centro CALAL and worked in the studio of the Italian artist Guido La Regina, after being introduced to him by the art historian Lionello Venturi.

Her first solo exhibition in Rome in 1960 was followed by shows across Italy and India, which also featured a visit by M.F. Husain, who signed the guest book. She moved to Karachi in 1964, continuing her career here through painting, teaching, jewellery design and exhibitions.

Recently, Karachi’s Chawkandi Art Gallery held a retrospective of Bilgrami’s work, alongside the launch of her book of poetry and paintings. Twenty-eight works were brought together, spanning more than six decades and going as far back as the 1960s. For viewers more accustomed to impressionist or narrative art, where an image often provides an immediate point of entry, abstraction can initially feel more elusive.

Yet, Bilgrami’s work invites attention through its sheer range. This is not the work of an artist who spent six decades refining a single visual formula, but of one whose practice remained open to experimentation and change. Despite the shifts in style and subject across the different periods, a certain familiarity runs through the exhibition, connecting the works across time.

A retrospective at Chawkandi Art Gallery revealed an artist who has resisted a single style, allowing experimentation, memory and lived experience to shape more than six decades of her work

One work that particularly invites contemplation is ‘Crossroads’, an oil on canvas from 1963. Its ochres, blues and yellows establish a subtle emotional balance, while intersecting lines suggest a moment of decision. The title evokes the uncertainty of being caught between what has been and what lies ahead, but the painting does not impose a particular narrative. Instead, it leaves the viewer with enough space to locate their own meaning within that crossing point.

‘Reaching for Light’, from her Spiritual series, operates differently. Its jagged lines initially appear disruptive, but with sustained looking, they begin to settle into a kind of harmony. The association between light and the divine is apparent, yet the painting never becomes merely illustrative. Its spirituality seems to emerge instead from the composition itself, from the movement and tension of the painted lines.

That same movement between the visible and the intangible appears in Bilgrami’s Eyes series, a group of small drawings, no larger than an A-4 sheet, made entirely in black pen. Each eye conveys a distinct emotional state — distress, curiosity, concern and quiet joy — while recalling a South Asian portrait tradition in which the face is reduced to a few defining lines and the eyes carry much of the expression. The simplicity of the drawings draws the viewer into a more sustained act of looking. The longer one studies them, the more the eyes seem to return that gaze.

If the Eyes series creates intimacy, ‘The Big Divide’, from her War series, brings history into view. When I ask Bilgrami about the painting, her eyes fill with tears as she recalls the violence and atrocities of the 1971 war in East Pakistan: “I wasn’t there directly, but I would hear about the violence, the atrocities and the things people were going through. It was extremely distressing to imagine and hear about what was happening.” Her response offers me a deeper understanding of the work, allowing me to connect more closely with what I am seeing.

Bilgrami had witnessed Partition in 1947 but by the time of the separation of East Pakistan in 1971, she was an established artist with a greater awareness of the political and human consequences unfolding around her. The two events carry their own distinct histories and significance, yet both became experiences she witnessed closely, prompting her to confront, understand and express the sense of rupture, violence and loss that war can produce.

Speaking to Bilgrami about her poetry offers further insight into her creative imagination. She speaks of poetry with the same sensitivity that marks her paintings, as she traces her relationship with language back to childhood. “I remember writing poetry in English even when I was a young girl,” she says. “Urdu poetry came into my life much later. A family friend encouraged me to read and write in Urdu and so I began experimenting with the language, adapting English poetic forms into Urdu and writing in free verse.” Today, she says, “I write more and paint less,” finding in poetry another way to express what cannot always be contained on a canvas.

Some artists become known through one recurring symbol: Jamil Naqsh had his pigeons, M.F. Husain his horses. Bilgrami resists that kind of reduction. Her subjects are too varied for any single signature to sum up. What stays constant instead is a way of looking: an attention to colour, line, space and the emotional life within abstraction.

That, in the end, is what makes this retrospective so engaging. In Bilgrami’s work, lived experience, personal expression and close observation converge, inviting the viewer to look with the same sensitivity that shaped the work. It is an invitation to pause, look closely and remain open to what reveals itself.

‘Siddiqua Bilgrami: A Peek into Creativity — Spanning 65 Years’ was on display at Chawkandi Art Gallery, Karachi from August 8-13, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, August 23rd, 2026

The “polka dot queen”, who passed away on August 14, channelled hallucinations and trauma into vibrant art featuring her trademark dots, nets and infinity motifs over a career spanning decades.

“Throughout an extraordinary lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation, Kusama pursued an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant-garde artist whose creative practice encompassed visual art, performance, fiction, and poetry,” a statement said, confirming her death.

“She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul,” it added.

Born in 1929, the youngest daughter of a wealthy family began producing her signature art aged 10.

“One day, after seeing a tablecloth with a red flower pattern on a desk, I saw the same red flower pattern all over the ceiling, windows and pillars. It filled the room, and covered my body,” she wrote in her autobiography.

Instantly recognisable in her bright red wig and bold spotted outfits, her exuberant work was the expression of a long battle with mental illness.

After studying art in Japan, Kusama moved to the United States in the late 1950s and rose to prominence in New York’s avant-garde scene.

Despite facing discrimination as a Japanese woman, she won fame for bold, big paintings and provocative 1960s “happenings” featuring body painting and polka dots.

She also launched a fashion line, established a “Church of Self-Obliteration” and styled herself the “High Priestess of Polka Dots” to officiate at a gay wedding.

Returning to Japan in the 1970s, Kusama voluntarily entered a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, where she lived — and worked — for the rest of her long life.

Her pumpkin sculptures — including one on Japan’s “art island” Naoshima — infinity rooms and immersive installations attracted huge crowds and sold for millions of dollars.

Visions and hallucinations

According to her website, “visions and hallucinations” beginning in her childhood engendered her first polka-dot and net-themed drawings, giving her a unique style from the start.

“She formulated a philosophy of art she dubbed ‘self-obliteration’ based on simple motifs of obsessive repetition and proliferation,” it says.

“I’ve had the privilege of viewing her paintings and your works several times. Bold, delicate, beautiful. That world was one I had never known. And to me, she was also someone truly endearing. May you rest in peace,” said one Japanese X user.

Kusama’s company said she died in hospital in Tokyo.

Mansour, whose vivid artwork depicted both Palestinian traditions and his people’s struggles under Israeli occupation, died on Monday at his home in east Jerusalem, his family said.

“The final chapter has been written. With hearts gripped by sorrow beyond description, we announce that our dear father has left this world,” the family said in a statement.

“For the world, he leaves behind a life filled with beauty and memories, and a legacy that will continue through everyone whose lives he touched. As for us, we have lost a father who was the source of our love, our strength and our refuge.” Mansour was born in Birzeit, north of Ramallah, in 1947 and studied art and design in Jerusalem, graduating in 1970.

The Palestinian culture ministry mourned Mansour, calling him “one of the most important pillars of contemporary Palestinian visual art, whose career over decades formed part of the Palestinian visual and national memory”.

The ministry hailed his landmark 1973 painting, Camel of Hardships, depicting an elderly Palestinian porter carrying the city of Jerusalem on his back, as “an artistic and national icon”, adding that his work served “as witness to Palestinian history and guardian of identity”.

Mansour was the recipient of numerous awards, among them the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture in 2019.

Cover photo: Sliman Mansour/Instagram

Curated by Tania Sohail, the group show invites viewers to contemplate what it truly means to persevere amid the complexities of lived experiences. Through layered visual narratives, it examines the intersections of personal histories, resilience, vulnerability and hope, offering a thoughtful reflection on the emotional landscapes that continue to shape our lives.

In Abdul Mannan’s ‘Karwat’, the restrained use of charcoal, combined with selective colour, creates a contemplative atmosphere in which gestures carry greater emotional weight than facial expressions. A child, head bowed, with a ponytail touching the ground and hands tightly clenched against the chest, presents a deeply unsettling image. The figure’s posture conveys an inward emotional tension, inviting viewers to reflect on themes of vulnerability, fear and silent resilience. A small humanoid figure with its head covered by a bag serves as a powerful visual metaphor for the loss of identity and psychological burden.

In Mannan’s ‘Qadam’, tightly bound feet, draped in delicate organza-like fabric and adorned with painted nails, evoke the image of a newly married bride stepping into a new home and a new phase of life. Rather than suggesting freedom or possibility, the bound feet become a powerful metaphor for restriction and endurance. The work introduces a poignant irony that, although movement is implied by the very notion of a ‘step’, it remains both physically and emotionally constrained.

Aqsa Shahir’s landscapes, with a restrained pastel palette of ochre, golden yellows and burnt sienna, evoke the tradition of English landscape painting and create an atmosphere of serenity, memory and quiet contemplation. In ‘Evening Drink’, the artist uses a mist-filled atmosphere, diffused golden sunset-light and tranquil meadows populated by two deer, which are the emotional centre of the composition, symbolising innocence and spiritual grace.

Through intimate depictions of fear, longing, memory and loss, a group exhibition in Lahore viewed resilience simply as the act of continuing

In Besmah Aman’s ‘Fractured’, a broken wooden stool towering over a curled child creates a powerful metaphor for emotional vulnerability. The fractured stool suggests that the very structure meant to provide security has collapsed. The split seat also evokes a wound, indicating that the fracture is not merely physical but emotional. Aman’s ‘Overlooked’ is another psychologically and emotionally charged piece.

In her series titled ‘Burden of Comfort’, Zainab Awan explores the complex relationship between pain, sleep and pillows. While pillows are conventionally seen as symbols of comfort, rest and solace, they also become silent carriers of our anxieties, pain or grief. In ‘The Passage of Time’, the stack of pillows replacing the sitter’s head and torso invites interpretation of accumulated memories, emotional burdens or maybe even of a loss of identity.

Danyal Awan’s body of work captures people in a state of waiting, caught between hope and uncertainty, their quiet longing underscoring the fleeting nature of time and the impermanence of human experience. The stark red palette symbolises emotional intensity, passion and psychological tension, reinforcing the themes of waiting, longing and the ephemeral nature of time. The figures are drawn with realistic proportions and expressive details, enhancing the emotional impact of the painting and making the subject’s experiences of longing feel more immediate and authentic.

ALIVE was on display at Ocean Art Gallery in Lahore from July 18-27, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, August 16th, 2026

The jewellery forms of Haroon are unmistakable, almost floating within dense, radiating patterns. Beginning with pieces inherited from her mother, she casts, carves and gilds their forms, embedding them in handmade paper and intricate geometric patterns. The colour of the ground intensifies the gold and dark blue motifs, while the rough edges of the handmade paper deliberately contrast with the precision of the miniature-like ornamentation. The result is apparent in works where necklaces and pendants appear almost suspended within radiating fields of turquoise, orange, blue and gold.

Minaa’s miniature training is apparent in her precision, but the layered paper, gold leaf and material experimentation take the work beyond conventional miniature painting. The jewellery remains recognisable as an object, while simultaneously becoming part of an abstract visual field.

The heirloom is neither preserved intact nor simply depicted — it is transformed into something closer to a map of memory. To my mind, it is this transformation of adornment into something approaching an abstract topography that is one of the more distinctive aspects of the exhibition.

Four artists examined the hidden lives embedded within objects, images and memories at a recent show in Karachi

Muzammil also engages with inheritance, though his is an explicitly artistic legacy. His father, Muhammad Rustam Khan, is a remarkably talented self-taught artist. The influence of his hyperrealistic portraits and the use of vibrant colours is evident in his son’s work. Muzammil responds by pushing against the restrained conventions of miniature painting and manipulating layers of wasli to create relief and depth.

His ode to his father through these portraits is technically impressive, but it is the contrast between faces of different ages that gives the series greater resonance. In one, a young woman, wrapped in a warm, ochre burqa looks away with an almost cinematic intensity. In another, an elderly man in a blue kurta and patterned turban confronts the viewer with a deeply furrowed face and meticulously rendered hands. Smoothness and weathering, youth and age become, quite literally, studies in the passage of time.

The most austere works in the exhibition are by Rafay. His compositions in stark black-and-white palette in drypoint (a printmaking technique using a sharp pointed tool to essentially ‘gouge’ a line into the metal), which initially appear to be simple studies of shadows, acquire a psychological dimension when one delves deeper into his intensely personal and disturbing emotional past.

His childhood experiences of punishment, confinement and darkness at a madrassa [seminary] inform this body of monochromatic works, in which black fields are interrupted by narrow passages of white. The white comes from the emotional release associated with light.

In one striking composition, vertical white strips penetrate rounded black forms, evoking bars, apertures or shafts of light. The imagery is deliberately sparse and this restraint is its strength. Rather than illustrating confinement, Rafay creates a psychological sensation of it, making the viewer conscious of how little light is available and how significant its presence becomes.

Raheela turns to something far more familiar: the apple and orange. In The Weight of the Rind, fruit becomes a vehicle for considering food security, inequality, sustainability and survival. She places the fruit almost ceremonially within an ornate frame, and her small, box-like presentations of an orange and an apple are particularly intriguing. Their almost shrine-like or specimen-case presentation makes ordinary fruit appear precious, vulnerable and strangely isolated, resembling specimens being preserved or objects whose availability can no longer be taken for granted.

The enclosing frames reinforce the ideas of preservation and scarcity, and the works are most persuasive when their symbolism is understated. An apple, isolated within an ornate frame against a green ground, acquires an almost precious status. The tension between abundance and fragility gives these modest subjects a wider significance.

Despite their disparate approaches, the four artists make ‘Time and Traces’ a coherent exhibition. Jewellery, faces, shadows and fruit become repositories of experience. The ‘traces’ are sometimes intimate and personal, sometimes inherited and sometimes connected to larger anxieties about survival.

What lingers most is the idea that nothing remains untouched by time: objects are transformed, faces weather, memories persist, light penetrates darkness and even something as ordinary as fruit can come to signify an uncertain future.

‘Time and Traces’ was on display at Canvas Gallery in Karachi from July 28-August 6, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, August 9th, 2026

Zahabia Khozema’s ‘A Memory Catcher Visited My Town’ is built around this fragile space between remembering and forgetting. Inspired by the recollections of a boy who grew up in an industrial town in central Punjab, this exhibition at Vasl Gallery becomes less a record of a disappearing place and more a meditation on belonging, loss and the landscapes we carry within us.

The artist’s statement introduces a stone-crusher, a goat-grazer and a coal-miner awaiting the arrival of a “memory catcher.” It unfolds almost like folklore, yet beneath its poetic language lies a sobering reality. The town gradually disappears under the pressures of capitalist expansion, economic violence and climate change. Rather than documenting this transformation literally, Khozema explores what remains when homes, communities and identities begin to dissolve.

This sense of abandonment is particularly evident in How Many Times Did You Pass by This House?, where an empty dwelling stands as more than an architectural form. Stripped of human presence, it suggests that buildings, much like people, retain the memories of those who once inhabited them.

Through luminous colours and dreamlike settings, Zahabia Khozema explores how memory preserves places long after they have disappeared from the physical world

Similarly, Let Us Meet Here Again, with its solitary chair placed within an expansive landscape, transforms an ordinary object into a poignant symbol of absence. The chair inspires conversations that never took place, people who never returned and places that continue to wait long after they have been forgotten.

The paintings rarely feel tied to a specific geography. Rivers, abandoned houses, flowering trees and open landscapes drift between dream and recollection, occupying a liminal territory where certainty gives way to sensation. Rather than reconstructing a town with documentary precision, Khozema paints the emotional architecture of remembrance. The viewer is left navigating spaces that feel familiar without ever being fully identifiable, as though assembled from scattered fragments of childhood.

Perhaps the exhibition’s most compelling quality is its use of colour. A body of work addressing displacement, environmental decline and erasure might be expected to rely on subdued tones, yet Khozema embraces intensely saturated blues, luminous pinks, violets and fiery oranges. In When the Mountains Called for Us, broad, expressive passages of warm colour, interrupted by seemingly unfinished forms and abrupt gestures, lend the work an almost dreamlike quality.

The looseness of the composition depicts the fragmented way memory often survives. Likewise, What Was Behind This is dominated by glowing reds and magentas, interrupted only by delicate passages of cool blue, suggesting that warmth and melancholy can exist within the same remembered moment.

Materiality further strengthens this atmosphere. Working with oil pastel and oil sticks, Khozema builds dense, tactile surfaces that reward prolonged looking. Thick deposits of pigment, energetic scribbles and layered marks prevent the paintings from becoming overly polished.

While deeply personal, the exhibition also gestures towards wider political realities. The vanished town is not presented as the inevitable consequence of time but as the result of systems that value extraction over communities and development over continuity. Climate change further deepens this vulnerability, reminding us that landscapes and livelihoods often disappear together.

Although the exhibition draws upon themes of capitalist erasure, economic violence and environmental decline, these ideas remain understated within the paintings themselves. Rather than confronting the viewer directly, Khozema allows them to emerge gradually through atmosphere and memory, inviting viewers to feel their emotional weight before recognising their broader social implications.

‘A Memory Catcher Visited My Town’ ultimately becomes an act of resistance. By preserving the emotional geography of a place, Khozema suggests that remembering itself can become a way of resisting disappearance. The exhibition stays long after one leaves the gallery, not simply because it reminds of what has been lost, but because it asks what remains when an entire town survives only in the memories of those who once called it home.

‘A Memory Catcher Visited My Town’ was on display at Vasl Gallery in Karachi from July 28-August 7, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, August 9th, 2026

Whether shaped by disability, gender, geography, political violence or ethnicity, the works of Attiya Shaukat, Rabia Farooqui, Maisam Hussain and Syed Hussain explore what it means to belong to a society that simultaneously excludes. The exhibition unfolds through deeply personal narratives, revealing the invisible fractures that quietly shape contemporary Pakistan.

Attiya has spent more than two decades navigating life in a wheelchair, after a fall just before presenting her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) thesis at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore in 2004 left her paralysed from the waist down. Rather than allowing disability to define her, she has transformed it into a language of resilience, self-examination and artistic inquiry. Her artist’s statement speaks of continually searching for inner strength and embracing experimentation as an essential part of her practice.

Frida Kahlo appears as an important artistic companion in Let the Dice Roll I and II, where stitched thread intersects with portraits of the Mexican artist, whose own physical suffering has long become part of art history. In To Be or Not To Be I, Kahlo’s face is stripped of every feature except her unmistakable unibrow, while her exposed heart extends through branching veins towards Attiya’s own seated figure. The artist herself is portrayed with her face completely obscured by her hair, suggesting both concealment and protection.

Four artists confront disability, political violence, emotional vulnerability and prejudice in an exhibition that explores the hidden fractures running through Pakistan

The paired work, Queen of Bones I, shifts the viewpoint to the back of her head, allowing the damaged vertebrae that caused her paralysis to dominate the composition. Attiya transforms the injured spine into both subject and symbol, reclaiming ownership over a body that has become central to her artistic vocabulary.

Where Attiya’s work turns inward, Rabia examines the subtle dynamics of instinct, vulnerability and power. Trained in miniature painting at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS), the artist employs gouache on wasli to construct carefully orchestrated narratives that deliberately resist easy interpretation. Her anonymous figures refuse portraiture in the conventional sense. By withholding identity, Rabia redirects attention towards relationships, gestures and emotional undercurrents.

Motifs of fire, water, birds and eggs become metaphors for contemporary political and emotional landscapes. Fire represents crises that have become disturbingly familiar, while turbulent water suggests disasters whose violence barely registers in public consciousness. Particularly compelling is the diptych comprised of the artworks Don’t Stop Me and Protection, where cranes, women and cats coexist in an uneasy balance of care and threat. In Forced Release, a woman struggles to lift a crane from water while its eggs drift helplessly nearby. The imagery recalls both maternal instinct and forced displacement, allowing multiple readings without prescribing a single narrative.

For Maisam, memory is inseparable from conflict. Born in Parachinar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), his childhood unfolded amid bomb blasts, gunfire and recurring violence. His paintings recall growing up in an environment where explosions, shattered buildings and dust-filled air became ordinary experiences rather than extraordinary events.

A sculptor by training and currently teaching at the NCA, Maisam works with unconventional materials closely associated with warfare. Every work in this exhibition is executed using gunpowder and graphite, transforming the very substance of violence into a medium of artistic expression. Rather than depicting war literally, Maisam allows its physical residue to become the image itself, collapsing the distance between medium and message. His restrained monochromatic surfaces convey trauma more effectively than overt representation could.

Syed approaches marginalisation through the lens of identity. As a member of Pakistan’s Hazara community, whose distinct physical features have made them frequent targets of discrimination and violence, he explores visibility itself as both burden and necessity.

His Document Series consists of exquisitely rendered portraits of Hazara children, painted on wasli. Instead of naming the children, however, each portrait is identified only by a number. The decision is quietly devastating. These are individuals whose humanity is unmistakably conveyed through delicate observation and remarkable technical precision, yet bureaucratic numbering strips away personal identity. The contrast raises uncomfortable questions about documentation, surveillance, anonymity and the reduction of human lives into statistics.

Although each artist speaks from a different social location, ‘The Invisible Collapse’ succeeds because it avoids reducing marginalisation to a single narrative. Disability, emotional vulnerability, political violence and ethnic persecution remain distinct experiences, yet the exhibition reveals their shared foundation: the struggle to be recognised fully within society.

By transforming personal histories into visual testimony, the four artists ask us not simply to witness suffering but to question our own habits of looking away. In doing so, The Invisible Collapse becomes less an exhibition about victims than about resilience, memory and the urgent need to recover our capacity to see.

‘The Invisible Collapse’ was on display at Canvas Gallery in Karachi from July 14-23, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, August 2nd, 2026

The venue for the General Assembly — an annual meeting of professionals working on art biennials and triennials worldwide — was decided following an open call for applications earlier this year. The 2024 meeting was held in Sydney and other host cities have included Sharjah, Venice, Istanbul, and Liverpool.

The five-day programme will include a number of conferences, round tables, workshops, and public events. These will be in addition to the Biennale’s own programming and exhibitions, which will continue till April 25.

The newly introduced Regional Meeting for Asia follows two editions of a similar gathering in Europe by the International Biennial Association. The Lahore Biennale Foundation (LBF) said the two meetings will share some agenda items and events, but the regional meet will “place particular emphasis on workshops and discussions addressing the specific opportunities, challenges and institutional realities shaping biennial practice across Asia”.

The LBF invited “universities, cultural institutions, civic organisations, artists, researchers, and other partners from across Asia broadly, and the wider international community” to the regional meeting, hoping to foster “exchange, collaboration and new forms of regional connection”.

The fourth Lahore Biennale is curated by Nav Haq, who serves as associate director at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium. The theme for 2027 edition is The Shape of Coexistence.

“Responding to a multipolar world, [the fourth Lahore Biennale] positions Lahore as a historic and contemporary artistic and intellectual centre from which to imagine new ways of building internationalisms that are relevant for the twenty-first century,” as per the LBF.

The foundation said the exhibition “will explore new solidarities and forms of exchange, drawing on the histories and engagements that connect Lahore with wider regions across Asia and beyond while foregrounding questions of plurality and social equality”.

Cover photo: Lahore Biennale Foundation

Hosted at Studio B2 in Islamabad, a venue owned by Fatima Hamid, the exhibition features 29 intricately stippled pieces. Utilising a careful mix of pen, pencil, watercolour, felt-tip marker and a distinct dash of ashwood veneer, Khan has mapped out a cartography of personal history, societal critique and spiritual reflection.

The exhibit’s title sets a hauntingly beautiful tone. The expression heda‘a kaar is a linguistic hybrid that blends an Arabic root with a Persian suffix to honour the oral tradition of Alheda’a, which is used in Saudi Arabia by herders to direct camels through the desert. It invokes the image of a lonely traveller in a vast desert, humming a rhythmic song to his camel companion so that, in the absolute darkness of the night, their heartbeats synchronise against the solitude.

For Khan, these paintings are a representation of that very synchronicity. After having spent years navigating the corporate grids of architectural practice in Islamabad and in the United Kingdom, it was in the process of creating these artworks that Khan found a path to harmonise his inner life with the outside world.

A solo exhibition in Islamabad explored loss, love and the fragile synchronicity between one’s inner and outer worlds

Divided into four distinct chapters, the exhibition functions as a visual memoir, elevated by the sensitive addition of collage work by the exhibition’s curator Muhammad Hamza. The conversation between the artist and the curator appears tangible through Hamza’s shared material narrative, which adds a rich framing to the entire collection.

The anchor of the exhibition lies in Khan’s exploration of loss. Having lost his father at the tender age of 15, the artist spent decades wrestling with the abruptness of death. One painting with tiny, meticulous felt-point lines acts as literal and metaphorical thread that reconnects Khan to memories of his father. Khan notes that, as he painstakingly drew these lines, a sense of consolation washed over him. He realised that his father, though gone too soon, had lived a full and meaningful life.

This ancestral thread beautifully loops into the present in a companion painting that features Khan’s daughter. An ethereal painting set against a vibrant, orange-tinged background, this piece shifts the narrative mood from the shadow of loss to the warmth of continuity.

Khan moves his lens from the personal to the universal in Facing the Wall. Here, a figure is depicted in a seated pose but without a chair. It is a striking metaphor for the modern professional, the worker bee of the nine-to-five corporate grind, who must constantly perform repetitive labour while suspended in mid-air, stripped of any grounding endeavour.

In sharp contrast to this corporate stagnation is Lover Boy. Bursting with coloured lines and a chaotic, vibrant mishmash, the piece perfectly encapsulates the frenzy of an adolescent body, heart and mind. Khan points out that this piece attempts to capture a fleeting moment in time before the harsh realities of adulthood hit the boy.

The exhibition takes a heavy turn with the War Series. Bound by rusted steel frames that mirror the decay of conflict, these four paintings display the crushing burden of war on an individual. Red dominates the canvas, overpowering all else. The work leaves the viewer with an unsettling impression of a soul caught in the crossfire of violence.

Khan reflects and meditates on the physical act of calligraphy through the monochromatic, repetitive writing by hand of the Arabic expression Astaghfirullah [I seek forgiveness from Allah]. The script, stretching languidly across the surface, captures the organic beauty of the creative process. Placed in stark contrast is the same expression generated by a computer. Cold, precise and perfectly uniform, the digital script feels hollow, a mockery of a deeply personal spiritual reflection. The contrast highlights how automation dilutes human devotion.

For the viewer, walking through ‘Heda’a Kaar’ is not a passive experience. As Khan navigates his life, caught up between building structures by day and carving out his soul on canvas by night, he leaves us with subtle, intricate details that demand a close look. Seemingly surreal and abstract, it is an exhibition that offers no easy answers, instead allowing viewers to experience the transcendent power of artistic language.

‘Heda’a Kaar’ was on display at Studio B2 in Islamabad from July 10-26, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, July 26th, 2026

Although Rubbani comes from a design background, becoming a mother changed the way she began looking at both nature and art. Nature has always remained central to her practice, but motherhood became, for her, its most sacred and powerful expression. Rather than depicting motherhood as an ideal or a social role, the exhibition approaches it as something instinctive, intimate and deeply grounded in nature.

The series was inspired by the artist’s visit to Europe, where she encountered centuries of artworks celebrating maternal relationships. Images of the Madonna and Child and Michelangelo’s Pietà became important points of reference for Rubbani, not only because of their artistic significance but because of how naturally motherhood continues to exist within public and cultural spaces.

Returning home, Rubbani became increasingly aware of the absence of similar imagery and conversations surrounding motherhood in Pakistan. This realisation became the starting point for the exhibition.

A recent exhibition in Karachi drew upon classical religious imagery and personal experiences to offer an intimate meditation on nature, identity and motherhood

In works from the Hold Close to My Heart series, Rubbani digitally manipulates and reconstructs historical imagery into compositions that feel both familiar and contemporary. The figures retain the tenderness of classical iconography, yet they no longer belong to a specific place or time. Their identities remain deliberately anonymous, allowing the emotional relationship between mother and child to become the true focus of each work.

One of the exhibition’s most striking visual elements is the treatment of the faces in the Hold Close to My Heart series. Instead of facial features, Rubbani fills these spaces with countless fine vertical lines. The lines do not erase identity. They can be read as a reflection of the discipline, emotional labour and quiet resilience that motherhood often demands. At the same time, by removing individual identities, Rubbani allows these figures to represent something larger than a single person and become symbols of motherhood itself.

This dialogue between past and present continues in Woven in Love, where biblical and mythological references are reinterpreted through the artist’s own visual language. Rather than borrowing these familiar images as symbols of devotion alone, Rubbani reshapes them into reflections on contemporary motherhood, care and nurture.

The technical execution of the works is equally compelling. In One Dusky Evening and On the Grass, Rubbani combines digital manipulation with intricate hand-drawn line work so seamlessly that, at first glance, the images almost appear to have delicate tracing sheets layered over them. This illusion of transparency encourages viewers to move closer, where the precision and patience behind every mark gradually become visible.

In Under Your Guideline, the painstaking accumulation of fine linear marks demonstrates the artist’s remarkable control of the medium. The dialogue between digital technology and traditional mark-making is handled with sensitivity, with neither medium overpowering the other.

The muted greys, pale greens and soft blues create a quiet atmosphere, while occasional accents of red gently guide the viewer’s attention through the compositions. This restrained colour palette allows the lines to remain the strongest visual element, without overwhelming the delicate emotional tone of the exhibition.

At times, the reliance on familiar religious compositions makes certain works feel closely tied to their historical references. However, Rubbani’s personal experience and thoughtful handling of the imagery prevents them from becoming mere reinterpretations. Instead, they become reflections on care, memory and the universality of maternal love.

In a society where motherhood is often treated as a responsibility rather than something openly celebrated, and where conversations around maternal care largely remain within the private sphere, Rubbani’s exhibition brings these experiences into public view. Whether one enters the exhibition as a mother, a child or simply as a viewer, the works leave enough space for personal memories to surface, making the exhibition feel both intimate and universally relatable.

‘Where Lines Hold’ was on display at the Sanat Initiative in Karachi from June 30-July 9, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, July 19th, 2026

By the mid-1950s, the young man from Peshawar had done everything expected of him. He had studied at Lawrence College in Murree before gaining admission to Aligarh Muslim University, followed by stints at Columbia and then Harvard, training not as an artist but as an engineer. Gulgee’s future appeared settled, respectable, even enviable. But if he had followed that course to its end, odds are he may not have found himself being written about in these pages.

Somewhere along the way, engineering had lost its lustre for him. He wanted to paint. But what now may seem like the inevitable path for him to chart — after all, as demonstrated by his corpus, how could this man be anything other than an artist? — was a decision fraught with tangible jeopardy at the time.

Upon hearing this confession about dreams of artistic grandeur, Gulgee’s father, Sher Ali Ismaili, was unconvinced. Before abandoning a profession for which his son had travelled halfway across the world to qualify, Ismaili instructed Gulgee to first seek the advice of Sultan Muhammad Shah, Aga Khan III. An appointment was arranged and a ticket booked for Cannes, where Gulgee explained to the religious leader that he wished to become an artist.

The Aga Khan’s response was measured rather than romantic and entirely befitting of a man who had played no small part in the fight for the creation of Pakistan: “Look, Gulgee, your country needs people like you — qualified, trained people. First, you give a few years — say five — to your country and, when you finish that, you can do what you like.” Gulgee obeyed.

A recently published coffee table book pieces together the remarkable life of the legendary late artist Gulgee through tales recounted by family and friends, critical essays and archival images, revealing a man every bit as fascinating as his art.

He returned to Pakistan and worked as a dutiful engineer on the design of the Warsak Dam in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. When the five years were over and his promise fulfilled, Gulgee resigned, declaring, “I will polish shoes, but I won’t do engineering. I will paint.” Hence, before the portraits of kings and presidents, before the explosive abstractions and luminous lapis lazuli mosaics, there was simply a young man at a crossroads trying to negotiate duty, expectation, vocation and ambition.

In many ways, it is precisely this sort of story that makes Gulgee Museum: The Handbook such a richly rewarding publication. Edited by John McCarry and developed alongside the opening of the Gulgee Museum by Gulgee’s son Amin Gulgee, the volume brings together essays by writers, critics, artists and family members alike.

But, having inevitably breathed in Gulgee’s art all throughout my life, in one form or another, I was far more interested in what personal insights this book had to offer into Gulgee the man. And I’m happy to report that it is Gulgee the man — his upbringing, humour, friendships, obsessions, discipline and contradictions — who emerges as the book’s most compelling creation.

As recounted by his brother Noorali in the book, Gulgee’s birth name was Abdul Mohammad Ismaili. “Gulgee” was simply an affectionate name given to boys in Peshawar, meaning flower. In fact, even the surname ‘Ismaili’ carries its own story. Gulgee’s father had abandoned the family surname ‘Rajput’ after Aga Khan III bestowed upon him the surname Ismaili.

In many ways, the book is at its strongest whenever those who knew Gulgee speak with candour about their memories of him. The artist Wahab Jaffer, who passed away just a few weeks ago, recalls first meeting Gulgee in 1972 through artist and gallery-owner Ali Imam, a stalwart of Karachi’s early art scene. Gulgee quickly became mentor, guide and, in Jaffer’s words, a “father figure.” But it is his description of watching Gulgee paint that lingers longest: “He was an action painter. He would run to the canvas and hit it with a broad brush… He would jump around, breathing heavily. It was quite the theatre for me.”

Years later, Amin remembers witnessing the same spectacle, only from the perspective of a son. Growing up, he writes, meant living with “the intense smell of turpentine and oil paints.” His father would indulgently prepare a canvas for him before becoming utterly absorbed in his own work. “I would witness his trance-like state as he danced in front of his surface.”

The book also reminds readers that genius is rarely a solitary enterprise. One of its most affecting essays belongs to the South Asian art historian Savita Apte, who restores Gulgee’s wife Zarine (Zaro) Gulgee to the story. While Gulgee immersed himself in the act of creation, she writes, it was Zaro who promoted his work, cultivated collectors, networked buyers and pursued payments whenever necessary. The artist’s extraordinary career rested upon an equally extraordinary partnership.

Elsewhere, the solemnity surrounding great artists is dismantled. The writer Nazeen Sheikh remembers Gulgee not only as an innovator but as “a madcap brimming with frolic and a great dance partner.” It is a wonderfully human detail.

Artist and art critic Quddus Mirza offers one of the book’s most persuasive reassessments, arguing that Gulgee approached abstraction “not with a Western eye, but through a mind that deciphered its context, impact and multiplicity in the art of Islam.” Mirza also credits Gulgee with freeing modern Pakistani art from the perception that it belonged only to elite audiences. His paintings, he argues, spoke to ordinary Pakistanis as much as to collectors and critics.

Equally illuminating is the writer Bina Shah’s essay on Gulgee’s portraiture. She traces how Ayub Khan understood portraiture as an instrument of cultural diplomacy, commissioning Gulgee to paint monarchs and presidents from across the world. Gulgee insisted on painting or sketching every portrait from life rather than photographs (the only exception being his portraits of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Allama Iqbal). The studies of figures, including the Shah of Iran, Richard Nixon, Rajiv Gandhi, George H.W. Bush and Ayub Khan, reveal both vulnerability and power, transforming official likenesses into remarkably human studies.

Other contributors illuminate the extraordinary range of his artistic practice. We encounter the figurative paintings and sketches of the 1950s and 1960s, the striking yet unfinished portrait of Begum Salimah Aga Khan, the dazzling pietra dura works fashioned from onyx and lapis lazuli, the monumental calligraphic abstractions, before arriving at the haunting Void paintings and the Nuqta series. Rather than presenting these as disconnected phases, the handbook reveals an artist in perpetual motion, forever searching for another visual language.

Nageen Shaikh’s discussion of Gulgee’s fascination with stone is especially memorable. She recounts how he developed his interest in using this material while travelling across Afghanistan during the late-1950s, after being invited there by King Mohammad Zahir Shah to paint portraits of Shah and his family.

Gulgee himself explained the attraction with characteristic simplicity: “Stone has been lying in the bowels of the earth for millions and millions of years and it will not disintegrate or fade. That is why I use stone. It is almost everlasting.” The remark feels less like a comment on materials than on legacy itself.

The images throughout the volume are as eloquent as the essays. Full-page reproductions capture the physical richness of the paintings, while archival photographs construct another biography. We see Gulgee with heads of state and collectors, but we also encounter more intimate moments that remind us this was a life lived beyond museums and galleries.

By the final page of this publication, Gulgee’s paintings had undeniably acquired a new meaning for me because the man who made them had finally stepped out from behind them. In doing so, the handbook reveals a truth that every great artist’s archive ultimately seeks to uncover: that life can be every bit as fascinating as art.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 12th, 2026

Among those gathered were many of the people responsible for making the pavilion a reality, alongside well-wishers, such as myself. Sitting amongst this company, I thought about the pressure of representing a country through art, but also about the extraordinary effort it must have taken to get here.

The exhibition itself, ‘Punj•AB — A Sublime Terrain’, featured the work of artist Faiza Butt, curated by Beatriz Cifuentes Feliciano. Pakistan’s participation at the historic biennale was greenlit by Islamabad a mere six months before the opening at Venice, which made this milestone even more impressive.

In 2021, I was part of the team curating Pakistan’s Pavilion at the World Expo in Dubai, and that experience has since profoundly influenced how I see public exhibitions, their role in society and the huge personal effort it takes from each person involved in making these public-private partnerships happen.

Pakistan has made its second-ever official appearance at the Venice Biennale with a pavilion featuring the work of artist Faiza Butt. The story behind how the Pakistan Pavilion came to be is as compelling as the art itself

This is Pakistan’s second participation at Venice, following the inaugural pavilion in 2019, which featured Naiza Khan’s work and was curated by Zahra Khan. In Pakistan, building a national pavilion remains a labour of love. Unlike countries with permanent structures for such diplomacy, each participation requires assembling an entirely new coalition of artists, curators, commissioners, government officials, diplomats, funders and patrons who believe in the transformative power of such an endeavour.

Hence, I hope this write-up also serves as a small record of what it takes to pull off something like this.

How it happened

Butt, who initiated the idea that culminated in Pakistan’s return to Venice, approached the project with an urgency. A graduate of the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, her work is part of several notable collections in the United Kingdom (UK), where she met curator Feliciano. Their partnership is one of the strengths of the pavilion.

Weeks after Venice, I spoke to both over Zoom. What struck me was the ease with which they completed each other’s thoughts. Feliciano described the exhibition as a continuous process of “editing intensity”, while Butt spoke of resisting any attempt to smooth Punjab’s histories into a single narrative. Between them was a shared discipline that the pavilion would hold multiplicity as its approach.

Despite individual conviction, participation for all countries at La Biennale di Venezia has always been through the cultural ministries of countries and is a form of track-two diplomacy — a point we often seem to gloss over, in favour of in-vogue themes of criticality and independence in contemporary art.

Also integral to contemporary art is both community and patronage.

Speaking to both Bangash and Jugnu Mohsin, I came to appreciate the coalition that made this pavilion possible. Mohsin helped build support in Pakistan, after which the federal government formally backed the project in October 2025. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif approved Pakistan’s participation on the condition that funding be assembled through a public-private partnership.

Bangash was subsequently appointed Commissioner. A historian of Modern South Asia with a focus on decolonisation, modern state formation and identity-based conflicts, Bangash is also the founder of ThinkFest. His key role, as I observed, was holding together institutions and expectations that would otherwise drift apart.

I also particularly appreciated his effort of bringing together most Pakistanis who were in Venice at the time and using his position to celebrate them all, including noting how meaningful it was to have curators from both the upcoming Karachi Biennale 2027 (KB27) and Lahore Biennale (LB04) present together in Venice celebrating a rare moment of convergence within Pakistan’s cultural landscape. I was grateful to have met Nav Haq (curator of LB04) and to wish him the very best from myself and everyone at KB27.

That gathering also prompted a larger question. National pavilions inevitably claim, in some way, to represent entire countries. Yet ‘Punj•AB — A Sublime Terrain’ is framed as unapologetically centralist, despite its themes and impact being wider. Rather than seeing this as a contradiction, perhaps it should be seen as an invitation. As Pakistan develops a longer presence at Venice, future pavilions have the opportunity to explore the country’s linguistic, regional and cultural diversity through equally compelling lenses.

The art

At the centre of ‘Punj•AB — A Sublime Terrain’ is Faiza Butt’s reimagining of Punjab not as a static province but as a layered historical terrain shaped by the movement of rivers, crops, empires and memory.

Her visual language, rooted in miniature painting but expanded into contemporary textile practice, layers Buddhist, Sikh, Mughal, colonial and contemporary imagery into dense compositions.

The large-scale tapestries and embroideries, installed in the site of a converted pharmacy, were produced with collaborators. Chief amongst these is Havelicrafts, a not-for-profit founded by Jugnu Mohsin in her village of Shergarh, in District Okara. Many of the artisans involved had never worked at this scale before, and the collaboration brought cotton, its production and the politics of Pakistan’s agrarian economy into focus.

Speaking to Mohsin, I realised that Havelicrafts is only one part of a much larger story. For years, she has argued that the disappearance of traditional crafts is inseparable from rural unemployment and ecological change. Her efforts to revive gossypium arboreum, the ancient Indus Valley cotton that has largely disappeared from cultivation, are part of a wider attempt to reconnect agriculture, craftsmanship and rural livelihoods.

Venice brings that conversation on to an international stage and becomes a way of thinking about labour, ecology and memory. As Feliciano explained, one of the curatorial challenges was transforming forms of labour often confined to the domestic sphere into works capable of occupying institutional space with authority.

In doing so, the pavilion asks us to reconsider where contemporary art begins and where craft ends.

Continuing such initiatives

Standing in Venice, I kept returning to Dubai. To the memory of how many moving parts had to align for a pavilion to exist at all, and how quickly those alignments dissolve once the event is over.

Pakistan has now participated in Venice twice. The real challenge is no longer whether we can produce a pavilion worthy of the international stage. It is whether we can build the institutional continuity that ensures that the next attempt does not have to begin from zero.

‘Punj•AB — A Sublime Terrain’ is on display at the Venice Biennale 2026 in Venice, Italy from May 9-November 22, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, July 12th, 2026

Dr Furqaan Ahmed has been a committed art collector for about two decades now. But for the practising doctor of medicine, it has not been about stocking his warehouse with canvases and installations. His interest has been immersive — visiting biennales around the world, holding conversations with globally renowned artists, participating in discourse with other artists — all the while learning, reading and researching.

The doctor has published three well-investigated books on different aspects of his collections. No other collector has gone this far in the service of art in Pakistan, as many are wary of the rap of the taxman. Taimur Hassan is the only other art collector in Pakistan who has contributed substantially to the art scene, exhibiting groundbreaking exhibitions at his celebrated Como Gallery in Lahore.

But while the exhibition ‘Karachi Cartographies — Seeing the City Through Art and Archives’ at Canvas Gallery and Koel Gallery in Karachi explicates a remarkable concept of visually illustrating the evolving lay of the land and its environs, it brings to the front some questions about empirical data versus aesthetic intervention. The structural vulnerability of ‘Karachi Cartographies’ lay in its inability to translate raw archival material into a cohesive visual vocabulary.

Archive as nostalgia?

The inclusion of large, innumerable city maps and architectural blueprints functioned more as a scientific index than a phenomenological exploration of space. Rather than treating these maps as static, objective data, the curatorial framework required a strategy that would have transformed them into lived sites — liminal spaces where audiences could negotiate a relational, temporal and individualised sense of place.

An exhibition that explored the city of Karachi through archival maps, documents and exceptional contemporary artworks shone brightest when the participating artists viewed the city through their own distinctive lenses

In the mind of the artist, maps become expressions of transient and fleeting geographies that are layered, complex and contingent. Artists such as Roohi Ahmed, who stitches maps with needle and thread on to fabric, acknowledge and employ the modules of creation by which art-cantered practices situate personal manifestations of place and layout, and make it personal. The map becomes home, neighbourhood, places of security or danger or boundaries crossed and kept. It is then that geography has meaning.

A map becomes a means of storytelling, like Naveed Siddiqui tells us in his assemblage of corrugated cardboard, and a presentation of data evolves into a compelling narrative. In the hands of the cartographer, the map is a scientific production, a tool for geographers and topographers and pilots and weather forecasters. The non-curator wants us to see these maps as historians. In the realm of artistic output, the possibilities are infinite.

Archival documentation of past events and experiences offers absorbing insights and perceptions into an unimaginable era. It is storytelling in black and white; validations of a dreamscape in sepia. While these historic fragments possess an inherent bricolage charm, they lack the artistic mediation required to address the power-laden relationships between past and present. They remain structural anomalies that belong more properly within the domain of institutional critique or an ethnographic museum, rather than a contemporary art space.

It is true that archival material plays a vital role in the development of art in artists’ narratives of memory, loss, reminiscence, belonging and displacement — some of the most common thematic inferences used today by artists globally, especially by artists in flux. But the curator/collector endeavours to show us the aura of the city through the eyes of his own family’s memorabilia as standalone nostalgia of times past with no analogous artistic intervention.

The part of the exhibition that consists of artists’ work is in itself quite spectacular and would have held the show without the excessive display of maps and archives. In themselves, they collectively speak of the complexities of a city, past and present, while stretching epistemological boundaries — everything required of a great show encompassing the changing face of an old city.

The curator/collector may have been cognisant of the fact that these works have been in the public eye before and an effort at curatorial novelty had to be exerted.

Through the artist’s lens

The opus-looking book sold at the event is only an accompanying catalogue documenting the show. But the real showstopper of the exhibition is the activity book created by the artist Sophia Balagamwala that serves as a vital piece of institutional pedagogy.

Balagamwala bypasses ponderous, postmodern critical theory in favour of an accessible, universal visual language. By effortlessly translating complex avant-garde concepts into an interactive format, she invites a democratic engagement with art. The booklet allows children to introduce their own gestural mark-making directly on to the page, subverting the traditional, passive viewership of the white-cube gallery setting.

Some of the most cerebral works on display are by Seema Nusrat, who injects found objects and fabrics with perceptively disassociated ideas and startles us out of our composure of everyday seeing. The common jute bag of rice morphs into a gunny bag for transporting a corpse, suggestive of the political violence that had clamped the city of Karachi in its grip over several decades. On it she transposes a beautiful vintage found tapestry, but the sack hangs ominously, as if tied hurriedly to conceal an object of conflict. Menacing road signs are treated ceremoniously to look like house facades.

Fazal Rizvi employs a minimalist formalism, utilising coded, rhythmic lines akin to musical notations to chart the temporal ebb and flow of the ocean. His long horizontal pieces, stripped of distracting visual expression, are remarkable representational paradoxes of angst and relief.

Jovita Alvares and Veera Rustomjee are both young, superlative artists who have recorded their minority family heritage as part of the larger community evolution of Karachi. Alvares uses old vernacular photography to map the physical and emotional geometry of migration from Goa to Karachi, transforming personal history into a broader narrative of cultural integration.

Rustomjee’s snippets of memory are Kafkaesque in their recollective value — wry and sardonic. They speak of the complex relationship between her Persian heritage and the myriad family tradition and influences.

Together, these two artists tell us more about the longstanding tradition of Karachi being the city that happily embraced diversity and built its complexity with gusto rather than ire. They talk of racial integration and the ensuing intangible losses suffered over the years more deeply than two dozen manuscripts and correspondences with governmental municipalities that we see spread across the exhibition, which are fascinating in themselves but belong in an archival museum.

Ways of seeing

We can recall Zarmeene Shah’s exhibition of Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS) graduate students in 2025, who delved into their eclectic histories to define critical engagement with the community and the abundance of archival material it brought to the fore within their visual dissertations.

The way in which the artist Naiza Khan has seen, recorded and documented the evolution of the island of Manora could have been the definitive conceptual blueprint for this exhibition. She uses maps and archives for the purpose of mark-making. Through her artistic output, Khan shows us the traumatic transitions that have taken place in Manora, the island that acts as a reflective microcosm of the country. Khan documented through her works the state’s failed promises of modernisation and progress, and the literal whitewashing of the local people’s social and cultural traditions.

Here, Khan takes a page from an almanac picturing the lens of a telescope and makes it the foundational source of a series of artworks, wherein the lens became the eyes and the visual descriptor. In that simple but complex linkage is a densely packed curatorial lesson.

‘Karachi Cartographies — Seeing the City Through Art and Archives’ was on display at Canvas Gallery and Koel Gallery from June 2-20, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, June 28th, 2026

Behram Farooqui’s exhibition Begi-Nama engages this question through a language of restraint. The folio becomes both artefact and void, while embroidery, traditionally associated with feminine labour and ornament, emerges as a medium that unsettles the authority of the archive. Farooqui’s solo exhibition, presented by the Vasl Artists’ Association, is part of the fifth iteration of The Museum Series at The Vasl Gallery, Karachi.

The gallery space was darkened on entry, drawing the viewer towards a dense, shimmering veil of tinsel-like threads, behind which embroidered text intermittently revealed itself, suspended between presence and withdrawal.

The folio format of the show invokes the Mughal manuscript tradition, ie miniatures, calligraphy, gilded borders. Instead of text, cascading threads form dense veils of gold fibre that both reveal and obscure. The folio becomes an archival fragment whose contents are withheld rather than transmitted.

Through embroidered folios and an invocation of the Mughal artistic tradition, a recent exhibition reflects on the forgotten women of the Mughal court and the fragility of historical memory

Here, ‘text’ exists as gesture rather than language, hovering between Persian and Urdu calligraphic traditions and abstraction. It resists reading and denies interpretive authority. Farooqui constructs a visual analogue to purdah: meaning itself is veiled, controlled and partially inaccessible.

Embroidery, particularly zardozi, historically belongs to the registers of courtly refinement and domestic labour. By converting thread into a script-like system, the artist collapses distinctions between writing and making, intellect and craft, but without resolving them.

Yet the stitched surface refuses discipline. Where calligraphy traditionally signals control and legibility, these embroidered ‘texts’ foreground fragmentation and loss. Labour becomes visible not as embellishment but as duration: repetitive, embodied and materially insistent, echoing forms of work historically excluded from official narratives.

Within this dense field, female figures called Urdubegis appear intermittently. Also rendered in gold thread, these figures are shown in repeated, identical poses holding a shield and staff. Their bodies are standardised, absorbed into a visual system of repetition that echoes the logic of the textile itself.

This produces a critical tension: while the work gestures toward the recovery of overlooked female agency within the Mughal zenana (designated area for females) the figures are simultaneously contained within an ornamental grammar that limits their individuality. Visibility is granted, but only through stylisation.

Historically, Urdubegis occupied a paradoxical position. They were elite female guards of the Mughal zenana who were trained, armed and essential to the security of the imperial household. Yet they were confined within highly regulated spaces of seclusion. Their presence was both central and structurally unseen. In Farooqui’s work, their abstraction becomes a metaphor for this condition.

Like an unreadable script, their histories are present yet inaccessible. The embroidered surfaces are not reconstructing biography but suggesting its erosion. The curtain-like fall of threads reinforces this ambiguity: it functions simultaneously as barrier and threshold, echoing the spatial logic of the zenana with its screens, jaalis and regulated visibility.

The word ‘Urdu’ itself is derived from the Turkic ‘ordu’, meaning camp or army, pointing to its emergence in the military encampments of the Mughal period, where linguistic and cultural exchange was dense and fluid. A central tension in the works lies between ornamental excess and structural disruption. Gold thread, framing devices and compositional elegance evoke imperial luxury, yet the centre resists coherence. It fractures, dissolves and withdraws from interpretive stability.

This rupture destabilises the authority of the archive. The folio, traditionally a site of preservation, becomes instead a site of uncertainty. The viewer is left not with recovered knowledge but with the recognition of its limits.

Urdubegis appear only sporadically in historical records, notably in the Humayun-nama of Gulbadan Begum, one of the few surviving 16th century texts authored by a woman. She was a Mughal princess, who was the half-sister of Humayun. But even here, the presence of Urdubegis is brief.

Urdubegis were recruited from diverse groups, such as the Tatar (a Turkic-speaking ethnic group indigenous to Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia), Kalmyk (Mongolic people in the eastern-most part of Europe), Kipchak (Turkic nomads) and Habshi (African) communities, from outside the Subcontinent where purdah was not practised. Their roles extended beyond security to include escorting, mediation and managing the controlled passage between the zenana and the external world.

Scholarly writings, including those by Professor Dr Rukhsana Iftikhar at the Department of History, University of the Punjab, Lahore, situate Urdubegis within broader economies of female labour in the Mughal period, spanning domestic services, farm hands, craft production, performance and administrative roles. Even when salaried or privileged, these women remained embedded in hierarchical systems that regulated visibility and recognition.

In Begi-Nama, Farooqui does not attempt to reconstruct a continuous historical narrative. Instead, he constructs an aesthetic of opacity. The embroidered folios suggest that certain histories cannot be retrieved easily, just like embroidery itself is a slow, laborious and layered process. Threads sit on the surface, but they also conceal what lies beneath. The abstraction of the text here is not a deficit but a method. It foregrounds the limits of historical knowledge, while insisting on the material persistence of what has been excluded.

Farooqui, a graduate of the Visual Arts Department at Karachi University, continues to explore how histories are shaped, withheld and reconfigured. In Begi-Nama, the folio ceases to function as a stable documentary surface, becoming instead a site where absence acquires form. Quiet, resistant and unresolved, the work holds history in suspension.

‘Begi-Nama’ was on display at The Vasl Gallery, Karachi from May 19-June 1, 2026

Rumana Husain is a writer, artist and educator. She is the author of two coffee-table books on Karachi, and has authored and illustrated 90 children’s books

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, June 14th, 2026

Wars, greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, melting glaciers, floods, deforestation, rising global temperatures and the ongoing bloodshed of innocent people caused by human cruelty are all forces that place existence itself at risk, disrupting the delicate balance of the ecosystem.

In an age in which human hands have altered the very rhythm of the planet, the paintings on display at the exhibition Imaginary Ecosystems at the La Galerie Alliance Francaise de Lahore echo this transformation, capturing the tension between nature and human presence. The overall body of work by the artist Kausar Iqbal is deeply rooted in Surrealism.

It is not intended to be decorative or immediately pleasing; instead, it deliberately unsettles, confronting the viewer through distortion and unease. The imagery carries layered meanings, exploring psychological tension, intrusion and the complexities of human thought. Through unexpected juxtapositions and disquieting visual narratives, the work resists passive viewing. At this exhibition, curated by Anne Sophie Francais, all the works on display are untitled.

Surreal imagery and symbolic distortion took centre stage at an exhibition in Lahore

In one of the paintings, a man’s portrait is drawn with a cunning, tense smile, his gaze cast sideways as if withholding a secret. The pale yet bold yellow background sharpens the viewer’s focus on the figure, isolating him within a space that feels both flat and psychologically charged. Behind him, a delicate white floral pattern unfolds and appears strangely detached from the subject, as though belonging to another reality altogether.

What unsettles the composition most are the intrusions of bird beaks: one at the mouth, another at the nose and a third emerging from the head. They appear to compete with one another, interrupting and fragmenting the figure’s identity. These elements disrupt the human form, suggesting invasion, mutation or an internal conflict made visible. The face no longer belongs solely to the man; it becomes a site of tension, where multiple forces collide, blurring the boundary between the natural and the human, the external and the psychological.

In another piece, hybrid figures — part human, part animal — introduce a distinctly surreal quality, making the composition subtly disturbing to behold. The viewer is not meant to passively observe. Instead, they are drawn into the miniature’s intricate world to uncover layered meanings embedded within its details. A central figure, with the upper body of a horse and human legs, appears entangled with a snake, evoking a sense of inner conflict and psychological struggle. The merging of forms suggests a body at odds with itself, caught between instinct and reason.

Nearby, an ape-like figure with human legs stands with its head bowed, a posture that conveys submission, introspection, or perhaps shame — hinting at the primal aspects of human nature that persist beneath the surface. In the background, scattered black birds flow across the composition, their movement creating a sense of unrest and chaos, highlighting the emotional tension within the scene. Together, these elements construct a visual language that is both symbolic and unsettling, urging the viewer to confront the complexities of identity, instinct, and the fragile boundary between the human and the animal.

On another canvas, a patterned elephant dominates the stark yellow background, combined with hummingbird-like figures. The circular form behind them acts almost like a halo or sun, giving the scene a dreamlike, symbolic quality. The way the birds hover around the animal creates movement and tension, while the animal itself feels grounded and still.

The elongated beaks of the birds are not anatomical but an intentional rendering, suggesting intrusion, tension, probing or communication. The fusion of a floral-patterned large animal with birds suggests a blending of life forms or ecosystems.

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, June 7th, 2026

Their practices engage memory as something porous, shifting and deeply embodied. The exhibition unfolds as a layered meditation on identity, displacement and the emotional residues of lived experience. Each artist approaches memory through a distinct visual language yet, together, they construct a nuanced cartography of the personal and the collective.

At first glance, Jamal’s oil pastel drawings appear almost childlike, with simplified forms, vivid colours and a playful, dreamlike sensibility. Yet, this apparent innocence gives way to something more complex. Her compositions operate as symbolic constellations where mountains, flames, celestial forms and domestic objects coexist in ambiguous relationships.

Figures drift between states, caught between vulnerability and quiet authority. Drawing on oral traditions and cultural motifs, Jamal creates images that feel both intimate and mythic, where memory appears fragmented, layered and unresolved.

A deeply introspective four-person exhibition in Karachi presented memory as something that can be reimagined and reconstructed

In Masharaan (Elders), Jamal constructs a scene that is both intimate and ceremonial. A row of elderly men sits shoulder to shoulder, eyes closed, their expressions poised between repose and solemnity. Each figure wears a differently coloured kurta — purple, yellow, pink, ochre, green, red — creating a rhythmic chromatic sequence across the composition.

While the colours lend a visual vibrancy, the mood remains restrained, even mournful. In the foreground, a pale, elongated form lies almost spectrally. It may suggest the shrouded body of a child, a symbolic offering, or a tangible fragment of memory. The act of gathering feels significant, though its meaning remains deliberately open.

In contrast, Mohsin’s paintings are marked by restraint and psychological stillness. Rooted in a sense of cultural dissonance shaped by movement across geographies, his figures inhabit spaces of introspection, suspended between presence and absence. There is a subtle theatricality to these works: the subjects appear aware of being observed, yet remain internally withdrawn.

Mohsin’s unconventional journey, from cake artistry to economics to fine art, manifests in a refined sensitivity to surface, colour and composition. His paintings engage with the performance of identity, reflecting how individuals navigate layered expectations imposed by society and self.

In Haraam, Mohsin distils a moment of quiet tension. A solitary male figure sits at a table, absorbed in a private reckoning. The composition is sparse, yet charged. The title, with its connotations of prohibition and moral transgression, frames the scene as one of internal conflict rather than simple contemplation. What unfolds is an encounter with the self — fraught, unresolved and deeply human.

Agha’s paintings extend the exhibition’s concerns into a more philosophical register. Agha was an advocate before becoming a figurative painter. He studied at the Royal College of Art in the field of history painting, and later received training through courses at the Florence Academy of Art in Florence, Italy.

His images are deeply private yet resonate with a broader universality. His imagery emerges from internal landscapes, occupying spaces between dream and document. Themes of power, violence and cultural inheritance surface obliquely, inviting reflection rather than assertion. Memory, here, is not a fixed record but an evolving negotiation.

The Deposition reinterprets the historical motif of Christ’s removal from the cross through a contemporary lens. A coffin is lowered or supported by surrounding figures whose gestures convey grief and collective burden. Time and place are deliberately blurred, allowing the scene to move beyond its biblical origins into a more universal meditation on loss and interdependence. The scale of the work intensifies its emotional impact, foregrounding both the fragility of the body and the persistence of care.

If Jamal, Mohsin and Agha explore memory through image and atmosphere, Chishti grounds it in materiality. Her sculptural works, constructed from discarded textiles, carry the weight of touch, use, and time. These fabrics, often drawn from personal or ceremonial contexts, are not neutral but act as repositories of memory. Chishti’s practice, shaped by experiences of displacement and familial rupture, transforms these remnants into forms that speak of endurance and survival.

Her engagement with the idea of the caryatid (a sculpted female figure as architectural support) is telling. In her work, this classical ideal is reimagined through bodies marked by lived experience. These figures are not monumental in scale, yet they possess a quiet strength, embodying what might be understood as the architecture of memory: the invisible ways in which histories are carried within the body. An ecological dimension also underlies her practice, as the reuse of textiles gestures towards cycles of consumption, care and preservation.

In Until the Sparrows Return, a small sculpture fashioned from discarded cloth takes the form of an industrial oil barrel, upon which a female figure perches. Suspended between refuge and abandonment, she inhabits the silence that follows devastation — when even the sparrows have disappeared. Her worn, repeatedly stitched clothing becomes a testament to endurance, each seam resisting erasure. The figure exists at a threshold between ruin and return, where survival itself becomes a form of waiting.

Chishti connects this work to her earlier series In the Absence of Sparrows, where women are depicted holding one another in the aftermath of conflict. These works foreground the often unseen labour of women who sustain life amid destruction.

What binds ‘The Geography of Memory’ is its refusal to treat memory as stable or singular. Instead, memory emerges as fluid, contested and deeply subjective, something that can be reimagined and reconstructed. The exhibition resists definitive narratives, opening space for reflection and personal association.

It offers a compelling reminder that memory, in all its fragility and persistence, remains one of the most vital terrains through which art can engage the world.

‘The Geography of Memory’ was on display at Canvas Gallery, Karachi from May 5-14, 2026

Cover: Usaydh Agha’s Prayer To (left) and Bearing Witness I by Mustafa Mohsin

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, 31st, 2026

Her surfaces are layered, with forms emerging and receding through controlled yet expressive brushwork. A tension persists between clarity and obscurity: faces are partially withheld, bodies cropped or multiplied, gestures interrupted. This withholding becomes central to her visual syntax, inviting the viewer not to resolve the image, but to inhabit its ambiguity.

For her solo exhibition ‘Locus: Where Eyes Settle’ at Karachi’s Chawkandi Art Gallery, the artist has displayed only six paintings, yet each carries a striking sense of intensity and conceptual weight. The exhibition focuses on surveillance, gendered labour and Karachi’s masculine-coded public spaces, examining how women navigate sites shaped by water politics and ecology. Reimagining female presence in male-centric environments such as dhabas in Ibrahim Hyderi Fishing Village, Rahman employs surveillance as a critical lens.

Her engagement with the female form is particularly significant. Rather than presenting it as fixed or symbolic, she treats it as fluid and psychological rather than merely physical. In doing so, she sidesteps the didacticism that can accompany gendered representation, offering instead a more introspective reading of selfhood. The ‘alternate selves’ implied in her work are less about spectacle and more about instability — about the shifting, often contradictory conditions of being.

Amna Rahman’s striking artworks capture women within spaces shaped by labour, surveillance and masculine power

One painting, set within a dhaba, is perhaps the most overtly theatrical. Horizontally stretched, almost cinematic, it stages a compressed space where two central seated women disrupt an otherwise all-male environment. Rahman, who photographs such situations first, says the men were all watching a movie on television. Their frontal, steady gaze anchors the composition, while the surrounding men glance obliquely, their attention fragmented and unsettled. The politics of looking becomes central: the women’s composure contrasts with the men’s quiet curiosity. Subtle shifts in body language — folded arms, turned torsos — heighten this tension. A muted palette of dusty blues, ochres and greys reinforces the claustrophobic interior, while everyday details ground the scene in a recognisable socio-economic milieu. The result is a social rupture — a reordering of space and power.

In contrast, another painting presents a female driver seated within the richly ornamented cabin of what is revealed to be a water tanker. This environment, deeply coded as male within South Asian visual culture, is re-occupied with quiet authority. The woman is neither symbolic nor decorative, as she appears entirely at ease, absorbed and in control. The interior, dense with textiles, tassels and painted motifs, echoes the language of truck art but with painterly restraint. Light enters through an open window, yet the psychological focus remains inward. Her posture suggests both comfort and readiness, while her contemplative expression introduces a subtle tension. This is not a simplified image of empowerment but an exploration of presence — of occupying space without spectacle.

A third painting expands into a coastal setting, depicting a boat crowded with fishermen, workers and a centrally placed woman. The composition is more open, yet the atmosphere is heavy and subdued. The overcast sky and muted palette evoke fatigue and introspection. The woman, standing slightly apart, looks outward, as if registering a horizon beyond the frame. The boat becomes a metaphor: precarious, collective, suspended between survival and uncertainty. Nets, ropes, and tools are rendered with care, reinforcing the materiality of labour.

Together, these works, alongside the remaining three equally potent canvases, form a concise yet powerful body of work. Rahman is not merely documenting environments — she is re-inscribing them through gendered presence. Women emerge not as anomalies but as catalysts, subtly altering the emotional and social dynamics of each scene. Despite the richness of detail, the paintings resist romanticisation, operating instead through stillness, gaze and relational tension. Figures are caught in moments of waiting, watching or thinking. These states are rarely foregrounded in depictions of working-class life.

Ultimately, what binds these paintings is a persistent question: who belongs where? And, more crucially, who gets to look, and who is looked at?

‘Locus: Where Eyes Settle’ was on display at Chawkandi Art Gallery, Karachi, from April 21-30, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, May 24th, 2026

Although each work stands on its own, the four paintings were also conceived as part of a larger continuum. Together, they move through cycles of growth, intensity, reflection and stillness. Farooqi sees these moments both individually and as part of a larger current — one that keeps flowing and transforming over time.

Farooqi describes the seasons in Lahore as distinct and measurable, except for autumn, which can arrive suddenly and is often fleeting. These shifts became a way for her to think about the constant state of change that defines the human experience: moving cities, changing homes, forming new relationships and leaving others behind. In many ways, the paintings capture that sense of life always being in motion.

The exhibition’s title emerged organically from the work itself. Spring is fair and gentle, summer can be fierce and overpowering, and all seasons, like life, are fleeting. Farooqi wanted the title to reflect both the beauty and intensity of nature, while also hinting at the temporary nature of all experiences.

Four captivating artworks by Michelle Farooqi explore not only the changing seasons but also the gradual shaping of memory and identity

One of the most striking elements in the series is the recurring female figure that appears in every season. Farooqi explains that she initially imagined each figure as embodying the “spirit” of the season. To her, nature feels inherently feminine, and so the seasons naturally took the form of women. Over time, the idea evolved into something less literal, but the feminine essence remained. She also felt that the female form sat more comfortably within nature — less as a force acting upon the landscape and more as part of it.

Each painting approaches its season differently. Spring, the first work in the series, is intentionally sparse. Inspired by the Indian Coral tree, Farooqi focused on the striking contrast between its fiery blossoms and the relative emptiness of the surrounding landscape. Many trees in early spring are still bare, and she wanted the painting to hold onto that sense of emergence and anticipation.

Summer became the most visually dense and elaborate painting in the series. Farooqi describes Lahore’s summers as overwhelming — thick with humidity, greenery and intense light. She wanted to capture not only the heat but also the abundance of life that arrives with it. The painting is filled with lush vegetation, flowers and layered shades of green, reflecting what she calls the “almost suffocating burgeoning of the natural world.” Visitors to the exhibition are particularly drawn to this piece, perhaps because of its richness of colour and detail.

In contrast, Autumn reflects a quieter and more introspective mood. Lahore does not experience a dramatic autumn in the way colder countries do, but Farooqi associates the season with a brief period of relief after summer’s intensity. The cooler mornings, the falling leaves and the mild days before winter inspired a painting that feels thoughtful and transient. She sees autumn as a moment of pause — a time for reflection before another shift arrives.

Winter differs most clearly from the other works. Having grown up in Karachi, Farooqi is fascinated by Lahore’s foggy winters and the way mist transforms ordinary scenes into something ghostly and dreamlike. The female figure in this painting appears pale and almost ethereal, with light hair and softer features than the women in the other works. Farooqi explains that she wanted winter to feel less earthy and more fragile, like mist itself. The stark contrasts within the painting — pale skies against darker clothing and bare trees — were intended to echo winter’s particular beauty.

The paintings are accompanied by short written passages, which serve as emotional reflections on each season. Farooqi says that her paintings usually begin with visual imagery, and the writing comes later to articulate the feelings behind the work. The texts are not explanations so much as impressions — capturing what she felt while painting and what she still feels when looking back at each season.

Farooqi works in the Indian miniature tradition, using tea wash and watercolour on wasli, a handmade paper traditionally used in miniature painting. She began studying miniature-style painting in Lahore in 2018 and says the art form changed the way she approached art. Earlier in her career, her work was more representational, but miniature-style painting allowed her the freedom to stylise nature and use more imagination, while retaining detail and recognisable forms.

The process itself is painstaking. Tea wash is applied in multiple layers to build up warmth and depth, while watercolour techniques vary from controlled detail work to soft wet-on-wet applications, particularly in Winter, where the mist was created through the natural bleed of the paint. Farooqi admits that painting the fog was especially challenging, as she wanted it to remain atmospheric without becoming overworked.

Completing the series took roughly a year, often while balancing other responsibilities. Summer, with its abundance of foliage and flowers, was the most time-consuming, while Winter caused the most anxiety because of its technical demands. Yet the experience also revealed something important to the artist. Farooqi had rarely worked in a sustained series before, preferring experimentation and movement between subjects and mediums. This project required patience and consistency, and she found the process unexpectedly rewarding. “Painting each leaf is a journey,” she reflects, adding that the act of making the work ultimately brought more fulfilment than the finished paintings themselves.

When asked which season best represents her own life now, Farooqi answers with honesty and humour: she sees herself in autumn. As a middle-aged woman, she finds herself reflecting on what she has achieved while also recognising what remains undone. But rather than dwelling on regret, she speaks about embracing change and making the most of the present moment. Like the seasons themselves, life continues to move forward — fair, fierce and fleeting.

‘Fair. Fierce. Fleeting.’ was on display at the Tagheer Lahore Creative Space from May 1-15, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, May 17th, 2026

This year, in its 20th edition, Art Dubai opened a month late and in a scaled-down format after the regional conflict forced the organisers to revise their plans.

“When the conflict broke out, we were only a few weeks out from the fair, and so we had to make a decision as to whether to go ahead” with the three-day event, its executive director Benedetta Ghione said.

“For us, the message is about resilience,” she added.

The organisers, who normally sell around 10,000 tickets, made admission free to attract visitors, and have so far received 16,000 registration requests on their website.

The conflict has rocked the wealthy UAE, cutting off most oil exports and undercutting the safe-haven image that helped it become the region’s financial hub.

Despite the climate of uncertainty, some international gallery owners made the trip to Dubai, including France’s Frank Elbaz.

“Despite the situation, you can feel that things are bubbling here and that it’s a place with a future,” he said.

Based in Lebanon, which has also been dragged into war, gallerist Saleh Barakat also felt it was important to attend the fair out of solidarity.

“We are all here this year in order to be present and to say life goes on,” he said.

Originally published in Dawn, May 16th, 2026