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

We’re immediately struck by the juxtaposition of intricate detail and a wild, free expressionism in her work. Geometric paper, painstakingly hand-cut, gives us structure to backgrounds and skies, crisscrossing the (sometimes metaphorical) canvas like branches of a tree — intricate, precise and repetitive.

Layered on to this are spontaneous, textured and dramatic paint expressions, mirroring the fractal nature of the cut-outs, but with the randomness of natural fractals — wet paint pressed to wet paint and pulled apart gives the same natural geometry as a retreating wave leaves on the sand.

We see that the artist is exploring the nature of complementary opposites — like the light and the dark, sunset and sunrise, two forces that work together to make each other better, richer, more impactful.

As Dar puts it, “The theme of duality in my work explores my experience and emotional understanding of opposing forces that have always existed around us… It’s not the same as polarity, which talks about extremes. I’m commenting on concepts that need their opposite to exist and am trying to understand how to best balance and live in harmony with them.”

A recent exhibition in Islamabad combined precision and a sense of colourful spontaneity to striking effect

Dar further explains that, through her work, there’s a certain comfort with duality, but through her art she’s also trying to find more balance in her life: “I prefer the night and find the moon more charming than the sun — it’s quiet and calm, and there is something about this time that gets my creativity flowing. I have, however, made my peace with the day and the sun. I understand that the mind and body require warmth and light to thrive.”

Similarly, she is combining her genetic duality in her work – fine, precise and clinical cutting, inherited from her surgeon father; spontaneous, expressive and free-form colour from her artist mother.

As a whole, the experience of the works is a meditative one as we’re drawn into the canvas. The richness of the colours — deep blues, greens and pops of yellow and red — creates a vibrancy that is pleasing. As we stand further back, we’re almost expecting scenes to appear à la Monet and his Water Lilies, but instead we’re seeing a calm balance of colour, form and texture.

Dar also introduces an element of light into her work through glass-sandwiched frames, equally striking from both sides, hanging almost like a portal into a different dimension. Similarly, over 30 specially made light-box frames showcase a cascade of colourful paintings that truly comes to life when the lights are on, with each functioning as a unique piece.

Overall, we come away from the show with a pertinent reminder that duality and opposition don’t have to mean polarity and extremism. Like opposites on a colour wheel, sometimes our differences can help each other to shine, rather than being a cause for disharmony. A reminder the world could sorely use today.

‘Life in Colour’ was on display at 8B2 Gallery in Islamabad from April 11-May 7, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, May 10th, 2026

Art depicting conflict can mediate between our revulsion of death and our need to comprehend pathos occurring on a vast scale. Brushstrokes, like words, have agency to create a liminal space of thoughtful retreat, where horror that is too grand for emotions to process may be mitigated. Such works provide a holding space for us to recalibrate our moral and psychological compass. Quddus Mirza’s recent solo show at Canvas Gallery is a case in point.

Under the simple title ‘New Works’ are gathered nine large oil paintings and three smaller sketches. ‘New’ could equally and ironically apply to the turmoil the world has been plunged into since the razing of Gaza and the start of the Iran war.

Mirza provides a pithy artist’s statement for his work: “A perception in paint of the world in and around us.” With the two prepositions “in” and “around”, he simultaneously connects our subjective emotions (the “in”) to the global landscape (the “around”). This method of imaginative documentation is substantially different from photographic and videographic realism.

Through deceptively simple forms, Quddus Mirza’s latest work bridges the inner emotional world and the global theatre of violence

Mirza’s signature style of painting is contemporary naïve or faux naif [falsely naive]. This style deliberately chooses a child-like simplicity by eschewing refinement, three-dimensionality and classical proportionality in favour of simplified lines and flattened space. It is a style that acquires immense poignancy in the context of war, particularly the recent wars against Gaza and Iran, in which unimaginable numbers of children have been slaughtered. We enter the killing fields through saturated colour and scratchy lines that trigger emotional immediacy and intensity.

Underlying the stylistic disingenuity are complex manipulations, in which the rule of thirds is deployed by the artist to divide the picture plane, as is the use of emphatic contrast between black and white segments against fields of saturated and luminous colour. Both sky and ground are featured in the paintings, and the two realms create the narrative. The sky becomes the arena for the perpetrator to unleash terror, while the ground is the arena where the victims of downward-descending destruction face annihilation.

Airplanes, since their earliest use in 1911 for reconnaissance and subsequent aerial combat, have become a recurring feature of art about war. The British brothers Richard and Sydney Carline were the first artists to depict aerial landscapes during World War I. Airplanes feature prominently in several of Mirza’s paintings.

In A Stained Landscape, the upper one-third of the painting is dominated by a plane in black and white. The lower two-thirds of the painting is scattered with red graves on a viridian green background. A sketchy figure, unmistakably a child, lies between the graves.

The Ghost City shows an apocalyptic scene in which the accoutrements of regular life are dispersed across the canvas. This is rearrangement by bombardment. The scatter of items is unified by the underlying field of red paint.

The Book Still Burning is an enigmatic painting. The discourse turns on the mysterious identity of the book. Is the book a reference to a sacred document? Or is it a reference to the People of the Book who have conflicted with one another over centuries? The viewer can freely interpret the title, and this gives the painting many dynamic layers of meaning.

The painting Black Birds is overtly polemical. It uses the technique of collage. Images of various models of war planes are placed in the sky, while the cover of an old book is pasted between the heads of two figures. The title of the book reads “How States Are Governed.” This is sharp irony in a world in which the rules-based order has shattered.

The idea of governability connects politics and war as in the much referenced dictum by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz: “War is merely the continuation of policy (or politics) by other means [On War, 1832].”

Mirza’s perceptions align with our heartbreak and inability to prevent death and injustice. His universalised depiction of war highlights its insanity.

‘New Works’ was on display at Canvas Gallery in Karachi from April 7-16, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, May 3rd, 2026

In Chitral, wool felting was practised for generations, though it was not originally native to the region. It came from a wider nomadic Central Asian tradition, carried through movement and exchange, and gradually became part of local craft practices. Closely tied to pastoral life, where herding animals and working with wool were part of everyday living, felting was often a communal activity, used in making rugs, garments and household items shaped by the needs of the landscape and climate.

In What the Mountains Hide, Tahir Zaman brings this history into the present, but not as a continuous or secure tradition. Instead, the exhibition reflects on an endangered practice that is now almost non-existent and no longer actively practised in Chitral. The decline of pastoral life, along with broader global shifts, industrialisation and changing lifestyles, has reduced the need for handmade felt objects. As people move toward urban areas and different forms of work, the skills and knowledge tied to felting are becoming harder to sustain.

The exhibition was presented as part of the Vasl Artists’ Association’s Museum of the Unseen series. The series explores the intangible, the hidden and the often overlooked aspects of human experience and the world around us, asking artists to engage with ideas that are difficult to represent.

The exhibition consists of 13 wool-felted wall-hangings and two videos. Each wall-hanging differs in form and composition, yet they share a limited palette of hazel brown, white and grey. This restraint creates unity, while allowing each piece to maintain its own presence.

Works such as ‘Dance of the Clouds’, ‘Songs of the Winds’, ‘The Moon’ and ‘The Sun’ suggest a connection to natural rhythms and elements, even when the forms remain abstract. The repetition of these tones draws attention to the material itself. Wool is not treated as a surface to decorate but as something that already carries meaning.

The wall-hangings feel grounded in the landscape they come from. The browns suggest soil and rock, the whites recall snow and light, and the greys sit somewhere in between, like shadows or shifting weather. Together, these colours reflect the mountain valleys of Chitral, their skies, and their changing light. Each work carries a sense of place, even when it does not directly represent it.

There is a strong sense of touch in the works. Felt is dense, soft, and layered, and its surfaces hold marks of process. They show pressing, shaping and time spent with the material. This physical quality connects the works to the labour behind them and highlights the effort required to make each piece, standing in contrast to faster, machine-based production.

The two videos, a short film and a contemplative sequence, expand on the wool-felting process and show that felting is a lived practice, where knowledge is passed down through generations. At the same time, the exhibition holds a sense of loss. It does not present felting as something stable or secure but points to its fragile position today. As fewer people continue the craft, the knowledge around it becomes harder to sustain. The exhibition embeds this sense of loss within the material and the process.

In this way, What the Mountains Hide moves between past and present, linking the ancient felt objects of the Altai region to present-day Chitral, while revealing the distance between them. It asks what it means for a craft to disappear and, in doing so, points to the fading of a slower way of living, shaped by time, skilled labour and close attention to material and environment.

What the Mountains Hide was on display at the Vasl Gallery, Karachi from March 24-April 3, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, May 3rd, 2026

Cover photo: The Vasl Gallery

The resignations come days after the jury announced they would not consider artists for countries whose leaders are facing charges at the International Criminal Court — an apparent reference to Russia and Israel — for the prestigious Golden and Silver Lion trophies.

Jury members included president Solange Farkas, Zoe Butt, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Marta Kuzma and Giovanna Zapperi.

After the jury’s abrupt resignation, the festival announced emergency measures, including the establishment of two Visitors’ Lions which will be awarded based on votes cast by eligible ticket holders. The awards themselves have also been postponed till November 22.

A press release from the Biennale read, “All National Participations included in the 61st Exhibition, as per the official list, are eligible for the Visitors’ Lion for the Best National Participation, following the principle of inclusion and equal treatment among all participants,” implying that Russian and Israeli artists are back in the running.

Organisers said this was “consistent with the founding spirit of La Biennale,” which is “based on openness, dialogue, and the rejection of any form of closure or censorship”.

The decision to let Russia participate, even as the country continues to wage war on neighbouring Ukraine, drew sharp rebukes from the Italian government of Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who said it was “a decision not shared by the government,” but added that the Biennale was autonomous and its president “very capable”.

Her cultural minister took an even harder line, saying he would not attend the festival’s previews or its opening day on May 9 if Russia is allowed to take part. He also had a phone call with Israeli artist Belu-Simion Fainaru, where the minister “confirmed the Italian government’s commitment against every form of discrimination and antisemitism in Italian cultural institutions,” according to a statement from his office.

Fainaru had accused the jury of discrimination and threatened to take legal action.

The strongest response, however, came from the European Union (EU), which is looking to terminate a two million euro grant to the Biennale as a response to Russia taking part in the event. The Italian Ministry of Culture also sent a delegation to the Biennale on Wednesday to investigate Russian inclusion at the EU’s request.

Biennale President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco has refused to back down, saying the festival was “a space of coexistence for the whole planet” without censorship.

Cover photo: AFP

Fast-forward 16 years, Faiza is now set to represent Pakistan at the 61st Venice Biennale (VB), arguably the most prestigious and influential event on the global contemporary art calendar, which kicks off on May 9 this year. Titled ‘Punj •AB — A Sublime Terrain’, this year’s Pakistan Pavilion, curated by Beatriz Cifuentes Feliciano, marks only the second time the country has participated in the VB. Hence, the expectations and anticipation are, naturally, quite high.

‘Olympics of the art world’

There is a particular kind of pressure that descends upon an artist when the work stops being entirely ‘their own.’ “Artists are mostly quite egocentric,” Faiza says with her characteristic candour. “They have these ideas and then they exhibit those ideas. But when given this opportunity, I felt rather overwhelmed upon realising that this is not the ‘Faiza Butt Pavilion.’ It’s the Pakistan Pavilion.”

Faiza, with the shrewdness of someone who has been attending the VB for the past 12 years, describes it as “a cultural event disguised as an art event.” In fact, she is no stranger to having her works displayed in Venice. But staging a pavilion at the VB is a different beast altogether. It is, as she puts it, the “Olympics of the art world.”

As Pakistan gets ready to participate in the Venice Biennale for only the second time, Eos speaks with Faiza Butt, the artist representing Pakistan at the exhibition

Nations arrive at the VB not only to showcase artistic excellence but to signal national identity and relevance. For countries such as Pakistan, participation itself is fraught with logistical, financial and bureaucratic challenges — which would explain why this is only Pakistan’s second time participating. “It’s a very expensive endeavour,” Faiza explains, noting the layers of institutional validation and funding required before an artist is even selected.

But the greater challenge, for her, is conceptual. The risk of turning a national pavilion into a “vanity show” is something she has consciously resisted. Instead, Faiza has approached the pavilion as both a responsibility and an opportunity to create something that speaks to the world but also returns inwards.

Rooted in Punjab

Born and raised in Lahore and a graduate of the National College of Arts (NCA), and later the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Faiza is now based in London. “Migration is in my DNA,” she says. “My great-grandparents migrated, my grandparents migrated, my parents migrated and I migrated also.” That continued sense of family lineage and history is what led her to crafting the theme for this year’s Pakistan Pavilion.

Faced with the impossibility of representing Pakistan in its entirety, Faiza chose to focus on what she is familiar with, stating, “I cannot talk about Balochistan. I cannot talk about Sindh. So, I better talk about what I know.” In Faiza’s hands, focusing on Punjab becomes a way to explore broader questions of history, identity and memory through a specific, lived terrain. Through her works at the Pakistan Pavilion, Faiza intends to trace an arc that she describes as a “string of pearls”, in an attempt to connect fragments of history that are often overlooked or excluded from official narratives.

In doing so, she also wishes to challenge the narrow framing of history within Pakistan’s state curriculum, which she argues offers only a partial understanding of identity. She says, “Our version of history sort of starts from Muhammad bin Qasim and then moves on to the Mughals and then Partition. And I don’t think that’s enough to create a naturally profound mind or to help us understand who we are. So, my attention [for the Pakistan Pavilion] is on the chapters of Punjab’s history that are not focused on enough.”

Faiza tentatively shares a central motif from this year’s Pakistan Pavilion, revealing, “I think, maybe just to excite the audience, I can give you a few clues [about what to expect]. We are honing in on the notion of agriculture and, through it, we are honing in on the notion of cotton. We’re picking history through the root of cotton.”

To my ears, this sounds like a bit of an intriguing departure from some of Faiza’s previous works and, in many ways, that is exactly what she is hoping for. As Faiza puts it, the biennale is not just a platform to showcase past achievements but a space to “break ground” as an artist. “I have a fear of stagnation,” she says. “I like scientists. One should keep researching. One should keep bringing something new to the pool of information.”

A work of art in a work of art

The venue for the Pakistan Pavilion is the Ex Farmacia Solveni, a stately space built in the Venetian tradition. “Venice was never meant to be a gallery or a museum,” Faiza notes. “But Venice is a museum. Venice is a work of art. How do you put works of art in a work of art?”

Her answer to this is to work with scale, colour, light, the moving image and projection. Thus, she has a designer helping her realise her vision, because this kind of show is as much about spatial choreography as it is about individual artworks.

Importantly, her familiarity with the city affords her a uniquely useful vantage point. “I think I’m quite fortunate that this was entrusted to me,” she says, “perhaps because I have a lot of experience of showing in Venice. If you just throw someone in there and tell them to just go and do something, there’s a huge possibility they’d get it wrong. And you better not get things wrong at the Venice Biennale.”

Faiza is clear that this cannot be a “bombastic show” that dazzles in Venice and then disappears. She hopes the work will have a life beyond Venice and will one day travel to Pakistan, engaging local audiences, while contributing something of value to broader conversations about history, identity and culture.

She is not, she insists, in Venice to simply wave a flag. She wants to offer something that will outlast the biennale and serve as a meditation on a region of extraordinary richness and complexity. Knowing Faiza and her artistic trajectory, odds are that she’ll pull it off.

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

Cover: Curated by Beatriz Cifuentes Feliciano (left), the Pakistan Pavilion is titled ‘Punj•AB — A Sublime Terrain’ | Photo courtesy Faiza Butt

The five jury members who will select the winners of the Golden and Silver Lion awards among the 110 participants ​said they felt compelled to commit “to the defence of human rights” as part of their ​role at the event, which opens on May 9.

“This jury will refrain from ⁠the consideration of those countries whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by ​the International Criminal Court,” they said in a statement, without naming Russia and Israel.

The ICC has issued ​arrest warrants for sitting leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, for alleged war crimes committed against children in Ukraine, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war in Gaza.

The ​Israeli and Russian embassies in Rome did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Recognition of Israeli crimes in Gaza is not new for Venice’s prestigious art circuit. Last year’s Venice International Film Festival, run by the Biennale, saw Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab win the Silver Lion award.

The film, which follows the killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza by Israeli forces, received a 22-minute standing ovation — the longest in the festival’s history.

Criticism over Russian Pavilion

The International Art Exhibition has been criticised since organisers allowed Russia to reopen its pavilion at the event. After ‌Moscow’s ⁠invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian artists and institutions were excluded from major European events.

The Biennale’s decision sparked criticism from the Italian government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — a staunch supporter of Ukraine — but also from the European Union.

On Thursday, the European Commission said it had sent a letter to the Biennale ​informing it of its ​intent to terminate or ⁠suspend a 2 million euro ($2.34m) grant after they allowed Moscow to rejoin.

“There is only one ongoing grant, this is of 2 million for the ​next three years and this is the one we aim to terminate ​or to ⁠suspend,” an EU Commission spokesperson told reporters.

The spokesperson said the Biennale had 30 days to respond to the EU’s letter.

In a separate statement, the Biennale said the jury operates with full autonomy and independence.

“This is ⁠a position ​that the members have decided to bring forward and ​make public. It is a natural expression of the freedom and autonomy that La Biennale guarantees,” the statement said.

Cover photo: Venice Biennale

Subzwari’s work has consistently drawn from an eclectic visual vocabulary, ranging from Mughal miniature painting to currency imagery and contemporary popular culture. Her practice, enriched through international exposure at platforms such as the Moniker Art Fair in London and residencies in Switzerland and Finland, reflects both technical dexterity and conceptual ambition. Accolades such as the Chevening Scholarship and the recent Charles Wallace Fellowship further underscore her commitment to expanding her artistic language in art-making and writing.

Over the years, Subzwari’s imagery has shifted from delicate, atmospheric compositions towards more immersive and layered explorations of the inner self. Her earlier works hinted at emotional undercurrents through subtle figuration and dreamlike spaces — these have now expanded into complex visual terrains, where memory, identity and the unseen converge. This gradual movement away from the observational towards the existential finds a cohesive articulation in her recent exhibition ‘Lands Beyond the Veil’ at VM Art Gallery in Karachi.

Rooted in personal grief following the loss of two loved ones, the current body of work is suffused with a contemplative tranquillity. Yet, interestingly, this introspection is rendered through a palette of candy colours: soft pinks, luminous blues and pastel hues, which the artist describes as her “comfort colours.” Rather than sombre mourning, these tonalities create a gentle, almost tender visual language, suggesting not despair but solace.

In her latest body of work, Shanzay Subzwari transforms loss into a meditative visual language rendered in luminous colours

At the heart of the exhibition lies a meditation on the soul’s journey beyond the physical realm. Subzwari constructs richly imagined, mystical landscapes that seem to exist in an in-between state, echoing the Islamic concept of barzakh.

Unlike the Christian notion of purgatory, which is transformative and purificatory, barzakh is a space of suspension — a threshold where the soul awaits its eventual return to the Divine. Her paintings, therefore, are not about death in a literal sense, but about transition. About suspension. About the quiet choreography of souls in a space where time, identity and geography dissolve. This idea of waiting, of existing between states, permeates all the works.

In A Royal Welcome, a rhythmic and ordered procession of elongated, anonymous figures moves along the edge of a body of water. Drawing upon the flattened perspective and jewel-like precision of Mughal miniatures, Subzwari reorients this historical idiom towards the metaphysical. Identity dissolves in repetition — the figures become less individual and more like a presence, engaged in a silent, meditative circulation. The water here is not merely pictorial but is liminal, evoking a boundary that is both physical and spiritual.

At its centre blooms a lotus, an unexpected yet resonant symbol within a South Asian context, signifying transcendence and rebirth. Beneath this serene upper world, however, hot air balloons drift. Each distinct in colour, they read like an individual soul, buoyant and gently ascending, disrupting any sense of pastoral calm and reminding us of the vast unknowability of what lies beyond.

The balloons reappear in another painting, Garden Party, in which the upper half becomes even more otherworldly. The balloons — functioning as vessels of transition — populate a vast, open sky.

Another work, Jungle in the Clouds, shifts from movement to stillness. Set within an enclosed, garden-like space reminiscent of a Mughal bagh [garden], the composition feels intimate. A richly adorned elephant, evoking memory and wisdom, stands as a central, anchoring presence, bearing a small, ethereal figure that seems suspended between the human and the Divine. Opposite, a lone haloed figure raises a hand in what appears to be a gesture of recognition. Around them, a tiger resting yet alert, evokes latent power, yet it is not threatening — it coexists peacefully within this garden.

The peacock, often associated with beauty and vanity, but also immortality in various traditions, stands near water, invoking reflection and immortality. The garden itself becomes a metaphorical paradise, framed by an arch that functions as both a visual and conceptual threshold. Here, the sense of barzakh is no longer one of movement or waiting, but of dawning awareness — a moment where the veil is not fully lifted, but gently parted.

What is remarkable across these works is Subzwari’s ability to hold multiple symbolic systems in delicate balance — Islamic, South Asian and personal — without collapsing them into a singular narrative. Her paintings resist closure. Instead, they dwell in ambiguity, in suspension, in becoming.

‘Lands Beyond the Veil’ is thus not simply an exhibition about death, nor even about the afterlife. It is, more profoundly, about transition, about inhabiting the spaces between certainty and the unknown, presence and absence, grief and consolation. Through her evolving practice, Subzwari invites us not to look beyond the veil, but to pause within it.

‘Lands Beyond the Veil’ is on display at VM Art Gallery in Karachi from March 28-April 28, 2026

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

He believes that the beauty and symmetry of flowers reflects the underlying harmony of nature, referring to them as “vegetative soul”, reflecting a higher cosmic intelligence. Sabah Husain’s show at Chawkandi Art Gallery, Karachi, ‘Gardens of Memory’, was a visual treat, reflecting on the cycle of life through a study of plants in her garden.

Husain is perhaps the only artist in Pakistan who has worked extensively with papermaking. She studied printmaking at the atelier of Japan’s celebrated woodblock printmaker Tokoriki Tomikichiro in Kyoto from 1985-1988. Apart from her specialisation in printmaking at the Kyoto City University of Fine Arts, at an institute of papermaking in Kochi, Shikoku, and post graduate and research studies as Japan Foundation Scholar at the Tokyo University of Arts and Music, her extensive portfolio includes postgraduate studies in the preservation and conservation of works on paper at the Camberwell College of Arts, in London (1990).

‘Gardens of Memory’ showcases a passionate allegiance to nature, visible in her erudite observational skill and study of flora and fauna, created at her garden in Lahore during the Covid lockdown. Sabah’s expertise in drawing, painting, diverse processes of printmaking, printing and photography, organic dyeing and papermaking of more than three decades has consolidated into a compelling series of mixed media works on paper created by her by hand.

The matured paper, with rubbing of oil-based paints, organic dyes from the sap of plants, drawing, painting and photography, holds histories embedded in the memory of trees. She speaks of Yakshi, the ancient female nature spirits in Indic traditions, who are seen as guardians of nature and custodians of treasures.

The imagery of bamboo, weeds, the common sadabahar flower, jhumka bel [Rangoon creeper] and champa leaves from the garden arrives via layers of recall and as if grown on the paper. It alludes to a larger narrative on the loss of biodiversity and ecological change.

Husain’s narrative has evolved through her affinity to the poetic traditions of Urdu and Farsi, and the classical musical traditions of the Indian Subcontinent. It is immersed in Khayal, an imaginative and creative musical form, based on a fixed melodic composition called a bandish, but in which the performer has immense freedom to improvise, ornament and expand upon the raga. The lyrics are often poetic, focusing on devotion, or the changing seasons. Husain recalls listening to musical recitations in the monsoon and spring [basant] in the garden.

Husain takes stock of her mother’s illness and passing away as her work holds grief in the beauty of the cascading yellow amaltas blossoms that her mother had planted. Husain reveals, “During a year of lockdown during Covid, the garden became, even more so, a place to explore, observe, nurture and connect with many pasts in the present, a palimpsest of time. The amaltas, the laburnum tree, is the tree of life, and my mother had a predilection for the tree. She had planted it, along with most of the flowering and fruit trees. Amaltas, with its riot of yellow, was a source of delight to her during her illness.”

At an accompanying gathering, Husain’s conversation with the poetess Zehra Nigah provided an appropriate way to read her art. Nigah read from her early poem in Urdu, Gul Chandni Ka Pairr [Pinwheel Jasmine/Carnation of India Tree], “Last evening, I remembered, as if it was in a dream, in a corner of my courtyard was a tree of the gul chandni, I would play under its shade all afternoon.”

Beyond its ornamental appeal, the gul chandni is steeped in history, cultural significance and medicinal properties, besides it’s pleasing fragrance, just like Husain’s description of bargat, neem and peepal that “are standing sentinel like mythical beings, part of cultural, collective memory.” In Nigah’s recall, her own self (jism-o-jaan) is akin to the courtyard with the gul chandni. “The flowers are all with her, the leaves her confidante, the shadow of the tree is still dear.”

The key to understanding Husain’s art is to draw into the metaphor embedded in her art. What is more potent than the reference to Shehr-i-Mafdoon [a city of buried dreams that need awakening] from her mixed media series from 2012, based on Noon Meem Rashid’s poem Hasan Koozagar?

As Husain remarks, “Connections between communities rupture, as do traditional knowledge systems and intertwined ecologies.” Her position is clear: the imagery is situated within a non-linear, holistic viewpoint, from where she critiques the disharmonies and the many notions of loss, time and space.

‘Gardens of Memory’ was on display at Chawkandi Art Gallery in Karachi from October 15-24, 2025

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, April 5th, 2026

One enters expecting a meditation on proportion, perhaps even a quiet homage to the classical lineage of the golden ratio and its origins in Euclid’s “extreme and mean ratio”. Euclid is considered among the greatest mathematicians of antiquity, the ‘father of geometry’, and his golden ratio’s long afterlife in art and architecture is idolised across centuries of Western art.

Here, however, it arrives not as a guarantee of harmony but as an imposition. As Islamic civilisation spread from Spain to India, its architects absorbed and reimagined Roman, Byzantine and Persian traditions. With figurative art discouraged in sacred spaces, geometry flourished. Craftsmen became mathematicians, shaping infinite patterns and imbuing structure with meaning — domes evoked the heavens, arches bridged worlds and calligraphy made the Divine visible.

A hospital room confronts the viewer. The image, rendered across vertical panels, centres on an abandoned bed, surrounded by debris, ruptured ceilings and the residue of interrupted care. There is no visible spiral, no overt diagrammatic intervention. Yet, the image feels composed. The divisions of the panels echo a quiet logic of measurement and proportion.

In another work, a child sits amid ruin, clutching his teddy bear, the radiating lines converging with unsettling precision — as the artist observes, it feels “almost choreographed”, as though even devastation has been arranged for the eye. And in yet another image, geometry declares itself more forcefully. White linear overlays cut across a bombed domestic interior, where children continue to play. A boy lifts a ball toward another seated higher on a broken staircase.

The triangular configuration imposed upon them feels rigid, almost didactic — an abstract system pressing on to a moment that is anything but abstract. The children, absorbed in their exchange, seem momentarily outside it. The viewer, however, cannot escape it. The geometry insists, reframing the scene as composition, as structure, as something legible.

Then the spiral appears, unmistakable, almost lyrical in its sweep. It arcs across a field of rubble where men carry an injured figure, the curve tightening around the body as though to contain it. The eye follows instinctively, tracing its elegant movement inward, even as it registers the violence.

It is difficult in these moments not to recall Susan Sontag’s writing on the consumption of suffering — the way images of war are framed, circulated and absorbed into visual culture. Sontag delves into the idea of photography as an act of aggression. She argues that taking a photograph is inherently voyeuristic and objectifying, likening it to a form of predation. This idea was ground-breaking at the time and remains a subject of intense debate in modern discussions of ethical photography.

Rana’s intervention is subtle but pointed. By overlaying the golden ratio on to photographs sourced from various photographers, she does not claim authorship of the original moment. Instead, she intervenes in its afterlife. The images arrive already mediated, already part of a global archive of looking. What she alters is not the event but the way it is seen.

This gesture feels acutely contemporary. In an age of cropping and curated feeds, the ‘perfect frame’ has become second nature. We scroll past devastation rendered in striking composition, often without registering the dissonance. Rana slows that process down. She makes the frame visible and, in doing so, exposes its quiet authority.

A most eye-catching work is a serial grid of everyday commodities staged as a triptych, where the logic of the rule of thirds is both invoked and unsettled through excess, repetition and subtle shifts in arrangement. There is, in this, a continuation of concerns that have long marked her practice. Earlier works explored probability, permutation and the unstable threshold between order and chance — systems that promised coherence but delivered variation. Here, the system holds. The ratio is precise, unwavering. But what it contains is rupture.

The exhibition does not resolve this tension. It allows it to linger in the spacing of the works, in the rhythm of their placement, and in the oscillation between subtlety and assertion. Some images seem to resist the imposed order, while others appear almost to submit to it. The viewer moves between these states, never fully settling.

Rana offers no moral closure. Instead, she leaves us with a question that feels increasingly difficult to ignore: if the eye has been trained, over centuries, to seek harmony, what happens when it begins to find it even in the aftermath of violence?

The Golden Ratio — Math of Beauty was on display at Canvas Gallery in Karachi from March 24-April 2, 2026.

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, April 5th, 2026

Cover photo: Canvas Art Gallery

Through a curated sequence of 12 paintings, drawings, archival material and video interviews with Birmingham elders, Khan traces a journey from the political spectacle of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) to the lived realities of Mirpuri migrants in post-industrial Britain, highlighting histories of loss, trauma and marginalisation often absent from official narratives. The curator, Roma Piotrowska, emphasises the exhibition’s importance for local communities with Pakistani roots, viewing it as a reflection on technological ‘progress’, climate justice and postcolonial identity.

Khan explains she did not go directly to Mangla Dam. Her interest and investigation started during her time in France, where she studied water bodies as part of her research and drew some drawings of French dams in the Alps. It was there that she first saw the enormous scale of human-made structures designed to contain millions of tonnes of water — monumental interventions transforming entire landscapes.

Furthermore, she was inspired by Beijing-based artist Liu Chuang, who documented the socio-technical impacts of big dams in China, and Khan shifted her focus to her homeland. Her research led her to the Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) archives, where she found a 1951 article by the David E Lilienthal, an American public administrator, titled ‘Another ‘Korea’ in the Making?’

Saba Khan’s deeply poignant exhibition in Birmingham explores how the Mangla Dam’s construction triggered one of the largest migrations from Pakistan to the UK

Lilienthal, former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, visited the subcontinent in 1951 and warned that India and Pakistan were on the brink of war over Kashmir. He proposed that joint, technocratic development of the Indus Basin was the only route to peace and prosperity. This approach directly influenced the World Bank-led mediations that culminated in the 1960 IWT. Some hydropower experts note that the treaty, negotiated in a Cold War climate partly to curb Soviet influence, controversially allocated the west-flowing rivers to Pakistan as the lower riparian.

Pakistan’s water access was not inherently at risk even without the treaty. The agreement, signed by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistani President Field Marshal Ayub Khan, effectively partitioned the Indus system. Pakistan received the western rivers — the Indus, Chenab and Jhelum — and, to compensate for the loss of the eastern rivers, embarked on the Indus Basin Project, supervised by the British firm Binnie & Partners.

Although hailed as a triumph, the treaty has remained a flashpoint ever since. In 2025, following militant attacks in Kashmir, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi unilaterally suspended the treaty, asserting India’s right to its water, triggering a potential war scenario. International mediation secured a ceasefire soon after, preventing escalation between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

Correspondingly, in the 1960s, Britain experienced significant labour shortages in its industrial centres. By chance, many displaced by the dam were granted work permits to migrate to the UK, transporting an entire social fabric from Mirpur’s submerged valleys to the foundries and mills of the West Midlands and northern England.

Cities such as Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester, key hubs of the steel and textile industries, became new homes for this community. As factories and mills declined in the 1980s, the Kashmiri labouring class adapted itself.

In the latter part of the exhibition, Khan highlights the sociological framework of the Indian-British sociologist Virinder S. Kalra’s book From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks. Khan’s paintings shift focus to contemporary urban life and economic activities: from car manufacturing plants to neon-lit halal restaurants, independent small shops and beyond.

Khan’s new body of work acts as a ghostly chronicle in neon greys, greens and blues. She depicts the transcendence of technocratic brutality with the metallic lines of maps and bulldozers physically erasing the intimate cartography of Mirpur’s hamlets, transforming ancestral homes into sites of mechanical intervention. For the Mirpur diaspora, urban progress has been built on their homelessness, on the many graveyards where their forebears are buried, and these sites can no longer be visited.

‘Riverless Water’ is on display at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham, England from January 10-April 6, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, March 29th, 2026

An initial clue

In late 2022, an ambulance pulled up to a bombed-out apartment building in the village of Horenka outside Kyiv. Three people emerged. One wore a grey hoodie, another a baseball cap. Both had masks covering their faces.

The third was more easily identifiable: he was unmasked, and had one arm and two prosthetic legs, witnesses told Reuters.

The masked men carried cardboard stencils from the ambulance and taped them to what had been an interior wall of an apartment before the Russians obliterated the place. Then they pulled out cans of spray paint and got to work. An absurd image appeared in minutes: a bearded man in a bathtub, scrubbing his back amid the wreckage.

Its creator was Banksy, one of the world’s most popular and enigmatic artists, whose identity has been debated and closely guarded for decades. Banksy is best known for simple yet sophisticated stencil paintings with searing social commentary. His work has generated tens of millions of dollars in sales over the years.

Once an annoyance to authorities who viewed him as a vandal, he has become a British national treasure. In one survey, Brits rated him more popular than Rembrandt and Monet. In another poll, his ‘Girl with Balloon’ painting was voted the favourite piece of artwork Britain has produced.

Some critics believe Banksy’s anonymity is as important to his work as stencils and paint. The British press has run many articles over the years that tried to deduce his identity. Still, Banksy and his inner circle won’t talk about it. Some have signed non-disclosure agreements. Others keep quiet out of loyalty, or fear of crossing the artist, his fans and his influential company, Pest Control Office, which authenticates his work and decides who gets the first chance to buy Banksy’s latest pieces.

When the bathtub mural and other Banksy pieces began appearing in Ukraine, Reuters wondered about the artist and how he had pulled off the stunt. Horenka was less than five miles east of Bucha, where Russian forces had left behind at least 300 civilians dead seven months earlier.

So we set out to determine how Banksy did it — and who he really is. Weeks later, a reporter visited Horenka with a photo lineup of graffiti artists often rumoured to be the artist and showed the pictures to locals to see if anyone recognised him. Not long after, we heard that a famous British musician — one of the people often whispered to be Banksy — had been spotted in Kyiv, giving us a theory to pursue.

Reuters interviewed a dozen Banksy-world insiders and experts. None would comment on his identity, but many filled in details about his life and career. We examined photos of the artist, most of which obscured his face but contained critical information. We later unearthed previously undisclosed US court records and police reports.

These included a handwritten confession by the artist to a long-ago misdemeanour charge of disorderly conduct — a document that revealed, beyond dispute, Banksy’s true identity.

And in the process, we learned how and why the man behind the name Banksy vanished from the public record more than a decade ago.

Reuters presented that man with its findings about his identity and detailed questions about his work and career. He didn’t reply. Banksy’s company, Pest Control, said the artist “has decided to say nothing”.

His long-time lawyer, Mark Stephens, wrote to Reuters that Banksy “does not accept that many of the details contained within your enquiry are correct”. He didn’t elaborate. Without confirming or denying Banksy’s identity, Stephens urged us not to publish this report, saying doing so would violate the artist’s privacy, interfere with his art and put him in danger.

For years, Stephens wrote, Banksy has “been subjected to fixated, threatening and extremist behaviour”. (He declined to describe those threats.) Unmasking Banksy would harm the public, too, Stephens wrote.

Working “anonymously or under a pseudonym serves vital societal interests,” he wrote. “It protects freedom of expression by allowing creators to speak truth to power without fear of retaliation, censorship or persecution — particularly when addressing sensitive issues such as politics, religion or social justice.”

Reuters took into account Banksy’s privacy claims — and the fact that many of his fans wish for him to remain anonymous. Yet we concluded that the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse. In so doing, we applied the same principle Reuters uses everywhere. The people and institutions who seek to shape social and political discourse are subject to scrutiny, accountability, and, sometimes, unmasking. Banksy’s anonymity — a deliberate, public-facing, and profitable feature of his work — has enabled him to operate without such transparency.

As for the risk he might face of retaliation or censorship, Britain’s legal and political establishments seem comfortable with Banksy’s messages and how he delivers them.

On September 7, for example, he stencilled a provocative piece on the exterior wall of London’s Royal Courts of Justice, a historically protected building. It depicted a judge in wig and robes bashing an unarmed protester with a gavel.

Two months earlier, the government had designated the pro-Palestinian group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. The day before the painting appeared, about 900 people were arrested at protests against the ban.

Stephens didn’t reply to a question about whether the mural was tied to that crackdown. In any event, Banksy’s painted protest against British justice appears to have gotten a pass so far.

Under local laws, graffiti is a crime, with penalties ranging from fines and community service to (rarely) jail time. The day after the mural went up, London’s Metropolitan Police said it was investigating “a report of criminal damage” to the building. An investigation remains under way, the Ministry of Justice said. The mural was power-washed off the wall, leaving behind a shadow of the image. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the ministry said that as of December, the government had spent £23,690 removing the piece. The work continues, it said: next, specialist contractors will use laser equipment on the stain.

The justice ministry declined to say whether Banksy was penalised or paid compensation. Stephens had no comment.

Some artists have questioned if Banksy, once considered anti-establishment, now enjoys special treatment from Britain’s powers that be. In 2014, Vice Media asked: “Why Is Banksy the Only Person Allowed to Vandalise Britain’s Walls?” The story quoted David Speed, a street artist who ran a British graffiti collective. “It’s very much one rule for him and another rule for everyone else,” Speed told Vice. “When street artists do it, it’s vandalism. When Banksy does it, it’s an art piece.”

Contacted by Reuters, Speed praised Banksy as “a really important artist of modern times.” Yet he still wonders why “one artist should be able to have carte blanche and everyone else would be subject to penalties.”

“Is he above the law?” Speed said. “The evidence would suggest that he is.”

Some experts believe Banksy’s ability to use the world as his canvas is money in the bank. One analyst, MyArtBroker, observed that the Royal Courts of Justice mural helped bolster Banksy’s market value.

Although such public pieces “cannot be monetised directly, they maintain visibility and authorship — qualities that keep collector confidence high and demand active,” art investment site MyArtBroker wrote in a report on the 2025 market for Banksy’s work. Banksy’s “street interventions,” it said, help prop up demand and prices for his art as a whole. One Banksy piece was sold by Sotheby’s for £4.2 million ($5.7m) last year, the report noted.

Banksy lawyer Stephens didn’t answer questions about whether Banksy has been penalised for his exploits. But he noted that some owners are happy when he paints on their buildings. “It appears that if people find a Banksy added to their wall, most of them call Sotheby’s rather than the police,” he wrote. “The question of where the artist’s work sits in the legal landscape is an interesting one, and I’m as bemused as anyone else.”

This is the story of the art, commerce and paradox of Banksy, arguably the most famous anonymous man in the world. The journey to understand him began in Ukraine and took us to a billboard in New York’s Meatpacking District, and the walls and auction houses of London.

The photo lineup

For a quarter of a century, Banksy has created the impression that he can be anywhere, at any time, and go unnoticed. Searching for clues to his identity feels “like a treasure hunt,” said Ulrich Blanche, an art historian and Banksy expert.

After the Ukraine murals appeared, Banksy posted a video on his Instagram confirming the pieces were his. The footage also showed a painter wearing a grey hoodie in Horenka. It was filmed from behind the man, hiding his face. We went back to the village in hopes that locals had a better view.

Among the possible Banksys in the Reuters photo lineup was Thierry Guetta, a street artist who goes by Mr Brainwash. Guetta was featured in Banksy’s Oscar-nominated 2010 documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop. Guetta is French; Banksy has said he’s from Bristol, England. Given Guetta’s nationality and his role in the film, he seemed a long-shot candidate. Still, the idea that Banksy would covertly feature himself on screen might fit with his reputation as a prankster who hides in plain sight.

Another candidate, perhaps the prime one, was Robin Gunningham. The Bristol native had been “unmasked” as Banksy in 2008 by The Mail on Sunday. The British tabloid said its year-long investigation had “come as close as anyone possibly can to revealing” Banksy’s identity. But it hedged a bit. Its cover featured a photo of a man “believed to be Banksy”. When the photo first surfaced years before the 2008 story, the artist’s manager denied it depicted Banksy.

A third artist in the lineup was also from Bristol: Robert Del Naja, frontman of trip-hop band Massive Attack. A graffiti pioneer known as 3D, Del Naja hosted a 2013 exhibition of art he produced for Massive Attack. It was held at the London gallery of Banksy’s former manager, Steve Lazarides. In 2016, a Scottish writer had found that several Banksy street pieces appeared at the same locations and around the same time Massive Attack had just performed.

Horenka resident Tetiana Reznychenko told us she made coffee for the two men who did the bathtub mural and saw the two painters without their masks. As we swiped through the lineup on a cellphone, Reznychenko shook her head no. Then, when shown one of the photos, her eyes widened, even as she denied having seen the man in the picture.

That man was Robert Del Naja.

The reaction proved nothing. But it made sense given some other information we later discovered.

We also learned that the two men who painted the wall were escorted there by Giles Duley, the man with one arm and two prosthetic legs. Duley, a documentary photographer, lost his limbs in Afghanistan in 2011. His Legacy of War Foundation donates ambulances to local NGOs in Ukraine. After painting the Ukraine murals, Banksy publicly thanked Duley for lending him an ambulance to travel in the region.

Duley had an interesting link to one candidate. His photography has served as backdrop visuals at concerts of Massive Attack, Del Naja’s band.

Not long after the Reznychenko interview, we got another tantalising lead. A source had stopped by the Kyiv Hilton during Banksy’s time in Ukraine.

“You’ll never f*****g guess who I met,” the source said. “Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack!”

We later learned from people familiar with Ukrainian immigration procedures that Duley and Del Naja had indeed entered Ukraine. They crossed the border with Poland on October 28, 2022 — shortly before the Banksy murals began to appear.

But there was no evidence that Gunningham, Guetta or any other rumoured Banksy travelled to Ukraine in that period.

That left a puzzle: besides Del Naja, who was the other painter Duley took to Horenka? Del Naja didn’t reply to questions sent via his band’s manager. Duley, reached by email, said: “I’d leave that to Banksy’s team.”

The allure of anonymity

Some critics believe Banksy’s ability to paint at lightning speed in public and evade detection is “a big part of his work, or his most important work,” said scholar Blanche. “This anonymity is a statement in itself.”

His mastery of disguise began as a way of shaking the police, says former manager Lazarides. In an interview, Lazarides said anonymity served a practical purpose in Bristol, where authorities enforced “draconian” policies against graffiti. “Banksy’s anonymity, to start with, was exactly that: It was to evade law authorities,” he said.

Anonymity became integral to the brand. In 2010, when TIME magazine named him one of the world’s most influential people, Banksy appeared in a photo portrait wearing a bag over his head.

Despite such influence and popularity, most of the world’s top museums don’t display his work. Those contacted by Reuters politely declined to explain why. One of them, Britain’s National Portrait Gallery, owns a photo portrait of Banksy in a hooded coat and a chimpanzee mask. A gallery spokesperson said the portrait is in its collection because “the artist himself is a British figure of cultural and social significance.” It isn’t currently on display.

Banksy has evolved as an artist, from painting street pieces to making an Oscar-nominated movie to creating a hotel in the West Bank and a satirical theme park called Dismaland. He was quick to use the Internet and other digital tools to spread his work. Early on, he registered a website where his team posted online images of his street art. Images that got the most clicks were mass-produced and sold as screen prints.

How much would the revelation of Banksy’s identity affect the value of his work? Reuters contacted more than a dozen major galleries, museums and auction houses. Most declined to comment on Banksy. Views differ among those who spoke.

One of the largest Banksy dealers, Acoris Andipa, said his clients are enticed by the art, “not because he’s masked, not because he’s a Robin Hood-character”.

Gallery owner and dealer Robert Casterline sees a potential drop in the market value of Banksy’s work. “It depends how he spins it,” Casterline said of the way Banksy responds to being named. “And it depends on what he creates next and whether someone wants to hang it on their wall.”

Banksy is “not doing anything mind-shattering. Half of his paintings are sprayed stencils.” Even so, Banksy has “created something amazing,” Casterline said. “He formulated a recipe that the media became enamoured with. He created that mystique.”

That mystique has been monetised. In 2024, former manager Lazarides auctioned off art and personal artefacts, including 15 burner phones once used “for contacting Banksy.” The phone collection fetched $15,875.

Reuters examined what Banksy and people close to him have divulged about his identity. Much pointed to Del Naja and reinforced our theory that Banksy was Del Naja, who immigration sources told us was in Ukraine when the murals appeared.

In past media interviews, Banksy talked about his hometown of Bristol in southwest England, known for its street-art and music scenes. Bristol is where Del Naja began to paint as the street artist 3D. Some credit him with bringing stencil graffiti — Banksy’s trademark medium — to Britain.

In a 2014 interview with Very Nearly Almost magazine, Del Naja said he grew interested in the form because of stencils distributed with records by anarchist punk bands. One band in particular links Del Naja to Banksy. “I remember getting records from Crass,” Del Naja said.

Crass published its own fanzines. One gave detailed instructions for fans to make their own stencils. Decades later, Banksy offered similar instructions in his own publications. Crass printed its work under its own imprint, Exitstencil Press. One of Banksy’s self-published fanzines was similarly titled Existencilism. A Crass poster is featured in a diorama of Banksy’s boyhood bedroom that the artist created for his Cut & Run exhibition in 2023.

Like Banksy, Crass has denounced fascism and authoritarianism and advocated pacifism, feminism and environmentalism. The anarchy symbol eventually became common in Banksy’s work. Today he finances a ship that helps rescue migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. It’s named the Louise Michel, after one of France’s most famous anarchists. His ‘Devolved Parliament’, showing Britain’s House of Commons filled with chimpanzees, exemplifies his skill at sticking it to authority.

A crucial clue

On Instagram in June 2018, Banksy posted a series of rats he stencilled in Paris and called the city the “birthplace of modern stencil art”. He was referring to the May 1968 protests, when students papered Paris with posters made with screen prints, a variety of stencil art.

Banksy isn’t the first street artist to use rats as a motif. In the 1980s, French artist Xavier Prou, who goes by Blek le Rat, used stencils to paint rodents around Paris.

“Every time I think I’ve painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek le Rat has done it, too, only Blek did it 20 years earlier,” Banksy said in a 2008 interview with Britain’s Daily Mail. That year, Blek said of Banksy: “People say he copies me, but I don’t think so. I’m the old man, he’s the new kid, and if I’m an inspiration to an artist that good, I love it.”

In an interview with Reuters, Blek expanded on that view. “Does an idea belong to those who use it or those who find it?” he asked. “I’ve decided to think that ideas belong to those who use them, thus to everyone.”

Banksy has acknowledged similarities between his work and Blek’s, but he has cited another painter as a stronger influence. In a 2012 post, the FAQ section of Banksy’s website addressed whether he copied Blek. Banksy answered: “No. I copied 3D from Massive Attack. He can actually draw.”

It was a reference to Del Naja, the artist who painted as 3D, who stated in 2014 that his inspirations included the punk band Crass, and whose early stencil work, though less refined, resembles later Banksy pieces.

Another possible clue came from a longtime Del Naja friend, music producer Goldie. In a 2017 podcast interview, Goldie referred to Banksy by his first name: “No disrespect to Rob,” Goldie said. “I think he is a brilliant artist. I think he has flipped the world of art over.” The comment fuelled rumours that “Rob” was a reference to Del Naja.

As frontman for Massive Attack, Del Naja has used his fame to highlight political and social injustice, a theme of Banksy’s art and philanthropy. Protesting the Iraq War in 2003, Del Naja was photographed holding a placard high above his head. On it was Banksy’s image of a smiling grim reaper.

In an interview with CBS television first aired in 2023, former manager Lazarides toyed with viewers keen to solve the mystery. “I was on my computer and looked and I went Rob, Robin …,” he said. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That name’s out there and who says it’s true. Robin, Robert, Robbie.”

Lazarides continued: “Mr Del Naja is a graffiti artist, and I would say arguably way better than Banksy.” Then: “Yes. It’s Robert Del Naja. And me, and a few other people,” he teased, breaking into laughter. Then: “Well maybe I’m being serious and maybe I’m not.”

Hints like that were part of the reason we scoured Banksy Captured, Lazarides’ two-volume account of managing the artist from the late 1990s to 2008. The books are filled with behind-the-scenes photos. The shots of Banksy obscure his face, but the pictures and text are sprinkled with clues — including an anecdote from 25 years ago, when Banksy was arrested in New York.

Chapter 2

Caught in the act

In September 2000, gallerist Ivy Brown gave Steve Lazarides and Banksy an earful about her apartment building.

At the time, Brown represented Lazarides in his photography career. A billboard had been erected on the roof of 675 Hudson Street in Manhattan, an architecturally distinctive brownstone with a triangular footprint similar to that of New York’s famous Flatiron building.

In an interview, she told Reuters she was “having a meltdown.” September Fashion Week was under way in New York, and the billboard was an advertisement for Marc Jacobs clothing. The ad showed a young man’s head alongside the words, “Boys Love Marc Jacobs.”

“I felt it defaced the building,” Brown said.

She took her guests to the roof and hoped for help. “I was, like, ‘Look at that thing!’ You know, it’s like, ‘Yo B, love you to do something up there.’”

Over the next three days, Banksy hung out at a bar across the street. Brown said she often noticed him gazing at the ad. Advertising billboards had long fascinated Banksy. They are, he once argued, akin to how some critics view graffiti: a public statement foisted on people without permission. “Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours,” he wrote in 2004. “It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use.”

In September 2000, Banksy was shifting from painting freehand to using stencils, a method suited for repetition and speed. But when he climbed up on Brown’s roof to have at the billboard, he painted freehand.

The half-finished image resembled a billboard Banksy saw in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. In his 2023 Cut & Run exhibition in Glasgow, the artist said the movie scene inspired him to get into graffiti. In Jaws, someone doctored a tourism billboard depicting a woman on an inflatable raft in the sea. The vandal added a shark fin and gave the woman bulging eyes and a speech bubble: “HELP!!! SHARK.”

In a painting spree, Lazarides wrote, Banksy “doctored the Marc Jacobs Men billboard so that the model had goofy teeth” and drew a “giant speech bubble” that was strangely empty.

That’s because New York police caught Banksy before he could finish.

In his book, Lazarides mentioned the arrest, though not when it happened or the building’s address. But by geolocating the building in the photos Lazarides published, and by dating the Marc Jacobs billboard to September 2000, when New York Fashion Week was underway, we were able to unearth police documents and a court file from the incident.

The contents of these records have never been reported.

They show that at 4:20am on September 18, 2000, authorities found a man defacing a billboard on the roof of 675 Hudson Street. Because damages exceeded $1,500, police sought to charge him with a felony. Among the documents is the man’s handwritten confession.

“The evening the night of September 17 I had been out drinking at a nightclub with friends when I decide to make a humorous adjustment to a billboard on top of the property on Hudson st. Using a key I entered the building where I had been keeping some paints and using a ladder I painted eyeshadow a new mouth and a speach [sic] bubble of the billboard.”

Within hours of his arrest, documents show, the man was assigned a public defender. That afternoon, he was released after agreeing to temporarily turn over his passport.

“He got out pretty fast, and he called me,” Brown recalled. “He was like, ‘Ello luvvie!’ I said ‘Yo, B! How did you get out so fast?’ And he said, ‘Female judge, nudge-nudge, wink-wink,’” Brown said.

“I realised that part of his art was getting out of jail.”

Signed by the artist

The court file shows he would later post $1,500 bail in exchange for his passport. The felony charges were reduced to a misdemeanour charge of disorderly conduct. He paid a fine and fees totalling $310, and by early 2001, he completed his sentence of five days of community service, the records show. On the bail form, he gave his address as 160 E. 25th Street in New York, the location of one of Manhattan’s most eccentric hotels.

Before his arrest, Banksy had lived for months at a time at the Carlton Arms Hotel, which over the years has let artists stay for free in return for decorating their rooms. Archived pages of the hotel website indicate that in 1997, Banksy painted a mural at the hotel. In 1999, the site shows, he finished an entire room, 5B.

The work looked nothing like the Banksys of today. It was painted freehand, in a rainbow of colours. The characters were cartoonish. The hotel site attributed the works to ‘Robin Banks’ — a play on “robbing banks,” later shortened to Banksy.

Emma Houghton told Reuters she dated the artist for four years in the 1990s, “just before he was transitioning into Banksy”. In an interview, she wouldn’t reveal his true identity or how they met. But she recounted that in written correspondence with her, the name he used for himself evolved: from his birth name to “Mr Banks” and then “to Banksy”. In 2024, Houghton auctioned a number of these hand-painted and signed cards, which fetched £56,000.

Robert Clarke, a former Carlton Arms employee, struck up a friendship with Banksy and wrote in a memoir about their time together at the hotel. They bonded because both were from Bristol, Clarke wrote.

The book included a passage that would later strike us as important: Banksy, Clarke wrote, told him he was considering legally changing his name to “Robin Banks”. Reuters was unable to locate Clarke for comment.

When Banksy was busted in 2000, he wasn’t on the New York Police Department’s radar, said Steve Mona, the now-retired lieutenant who ran the 75-member vandal squad back then. The police had no idea they had nabbed ‘Banksy’ because the artist had only recently begun employing the style and pseudonym that would make him famous.

Given Banksy’s celebrity, the name of the culprit now takes on significance. It wasn’t Del Naja who defaced the billboard atop 675 Hudson Street. The man who confessed was Robin Gunningham.

In addition to his signature, Gunningham is repeatedly named in court and police documents related to the arrest.

The Mail on Sunday had been right in 2008 in making the case that Gunningham was Banksy. In hindsight, Gunningham’s effort to hide his identity began falling apart with his September 2000 arrest in New York. Records of the bust existed and they contained his real name. The books by former manager Lazarides wouldn’t be published until 2019. But the photos and the details Lazarides included about the arrest enabled us to pinpoint where Banksy was apprehended and the ad he defaced.

But how did proving beyond question that Banksy was Robin Gunningham square with what we knew about the murals in Ukraine?

Sources told us there was no record that Gunningham ever entered Ukraine. So who was Del Naja’s painting partner if Gunningham hadn’t been there?

We recalled a detail from Banksy’s Carlton Arms days. As Clarke notes in Seven Years with Banksy, the artist had once considered legally changing his name.

Chapter 3

On the trail

In the years after his New York arrest, Banksy became a phenomenon. His work seemed to be everywhere. No one seemed to know who he was, and many in the art world were dying to find out.

But in 2004, his anonymity act nearly collapsed after a run-in with a Jamaican photographer named Peter Dean Rickards.

Rickards was on assignment for the record label Wall of Sound. Banksy had signed with the label to produce artwork for album covers. He and Rickards met up in Kingston to work together. It didn’t go well.

“What we object to,” Rickards wrote on his website in a now-deleted post, “are people like Banksy who go around spewing pseudo-humanitarian b******t to explain their ‘art’.” He wrote that Banksy “was just some wannabe-punk ‘stencilist’ with his head stuck incredibly far up his own redneck a**.”

Rickards didn’t reveal Banksy’s name. But he posted 21 photos of Banksy at work in Jamaica, 14 of which show his face from various angles. In July 2004, one of the photos was published by the Evening Standard. The headline: “Unmasked at last.”

But the Standard did not have Banksy’s given name. And there was at least some question whether the man in the photo was Banksy. Manager Lazarides issued a firm denial, telling the paper it was “someone else.”

Asked about that denial, Lazarides told Reuters he doesn’t believe he saw the photo before talking to the Standard.

Rickards died in 2014. It’s not clear what prompted his beef with Banksy, but his photos are unambiguous. We compared them to many more from Lazarides’ books and to footage from interviews that Banksy, using his pseudonym, gave in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The man in Rickards’ photos was Banksy.

Image comparisons show that Banksy often wore a bracelet and watch, always on his left arm. His hair was brown and bristly. He had glasses and an earring in his left ear. Rickards and Lazarides also captured in their photos a distinctive tattoo on Banksy’s left forearm.

In July 2008, The Mail on Sunday ran its Banksy investigation. Citing an anonymous source, the paper identified the man in the Rickards photo for the first time as Gunningham, an artist from Bristol who was born in 1973 and attended the Bristol Cathedral School.

Archived copies of the student magazine, The Cathedralian, contain numerous mentions of Gunningham. These include a comic strip he created around age 11.

Later, Gunningham earned school awards for his artwork and was lauded in The Cathedralian for his acting and athleticism. He “showed stage presence” in a school play and was commended for “spectacular saves” as a goalkeeper on the field hockey team.

A nimble artist with a theatrical streak: key traits of Banksy, the persona Gunningham would embrace.

Curiously, after the 2008 Mail on Sunday piece, the trail went cold. We found no trace of Gunningham in UK public records. He had seemingly gone off the grid.

But we now had a hypothesis about why there was no record of Gunningham visiting Ukraine. It was reinforced when we reached former manager Lazarides late last year. He told us we were pursuing a ghost.

“There is no Robin Gunningham,” Lazarides said when asked about the artist’s identity. “The name you’ve got I killed years ago,” he said of Robin Gunningham. Searching for him would be “a straight dead end”.

“Life-wise,” he said, “you’ll never find him.”

Anonymity started as a way to dodge the cops, Lazarides said. Eventually, keeping the secret became a burden. By the end of their partnership, Lazarides estimates he spent half or more of his time managing and maintaining the artist’s mystique.

“I think it became a good gag, and then, if you want my honest, honest opinion, I think it then became a disease,” he said.

In 2008, Lazarides said, he and Banksy made a “mutual” decision to part ways. In one of his last acts as Banksy’s manager, Lazarides said, he arranged a legal name change for his client. Robin Gunningham became someone else, under a name that could never be linked to him.

“I don’t remember whose idea it was, but I know for a fact it was me that set it all up,” Lazarides said. He declined to reveal the new name Gunningham took. “You make a pact and you keep your word,” he said.

A secret no more

Lazarides did note that there was no hidden meaning, no pun, nothing special at all about the new identity Robin Gunningham took. “It’s just another name,” Lazarides told us.

That offhand comment was encouraging. It fit with another theory we had concerning the identity of the other painter with Del Naja in Ukraine.

We had compiled a rich public record of all things Banksy: his past statements, companies connected to him, and excerpts from books or articles about him at various stages of life.

By searching that data and cross-referencing it with other public records, we identified what we believed to be the name Banksy took. It is one of the most popular names in Britain, so common it helps him hide in plain sight.

Although those documents are public, Reuters isn’t identifying the specific ones used, in order to reduce the chances of revealing Banksy’s address and certain other private information. The documents include property records that establish a new name adopted by a relative, and records from a corporate filing — handled by Banksy’s former accountant — in which the only two shareholders listed were that relative and the new name assumed by the artist.

We had already placed Del Naja in Horenka, and witnesses described two men painting the Banksy mural there. Sources confirmed there was no evidence that Gunningham had entered Ukraine. But what about a man by the name we believed Banksy had taken?

That name is David Jones. It’s one of the most popular names among British men. In 2017, for example, there were about 6,000 men named David Jones in the UK, according to data analysed by GBG, an identity-data intelligence company. David Jones also is the given name of David Bowie, whose Ziggy Stardust alter ego inspired a Banksy portrait of Queen Elizabeth.

On October 28, 2022, the day Duley and Del Naja entered Ukraine, a “David Jones” also crossed the border at the same location, according to a source familiar with immigration procedures. The source also told us the date of birth listed on Jones’ passport. It was the same as Robin Gunningham’s birthday.

According to the source, records also indicate Jones left Ukraine on November 2, 2022, the same day Del Naja departed.

Banksy, born Robin Gunningham, later took the name David Jones. (Whether he still uses that name is unclear.) And Robert Del Naja, Gunningham’s graffiti idol, friend, and a man himself rumoured to be Banksy, has on at least one occasion been his secret painting partner.

Banksy wasn’t the Massive Attack frontman, whose 2024 climate action concert drew more than 30,000 fans to Bristol. But he has become a star performer in his own right. Case in point is the wild 2018 Sotheby’s auction in London of his iconic ‘Girl with Balloon’.

The painting had recently sold for $1.4m. When it went up for resale that day, the art world was shocked to watch the piece get partially shredded by a device Banksy had secretly built into its frame. That piece, renamed ‘Love is in the Bin’, sold three years later for about $25m.

Art dealer Casterline was at the auction and remembers when the shredder began to beep. He pulled out his phone to take pictures.

“Unfortunately, there was one person standing in front of me,” blocking the view, he said. It was an eccentric-looking man with a broad neck scarf and thick eyewear. Oddly, the man wasn’t watching the painting get shredded. He was looking in the other direction, observing the crowd’s reaction.

Only later, reviewing what he shot, did Casterline notice that the man’s glasses appeared to have a small camera built into the bridge. (Banksy later posted a video of the stunt, including shots of the astonished audience.) Having seen Rickards’ 2004 photo of Robin Gunningham, Casterline is “pretty sure” it was the same man, thinner and older.

Casterline still has the photos. He is keeping them private, save for a tiny crop of the man’s glasses he shared with us. He echoed what many say in Banksy’s protective circle of friends, partners, collectors and critics.

“I don’t want to be the guy who exposes Banksy,” he said.

A language outside one’s fluency subverts certainty, invites opacity and aesthetically fictionalises the script, while seemingly becoming a mark, a form where meaning migrates semantic clarity to embody perception. It exposes us to the politics of legibility. Thinkers such as the French philosopher Ronald Barthes expand such semiotic resonance to carry ideologies.

These questions envelop the exhibition ‘Urdu Worlds’, curated by Hammad Nasar at Dubai’s Ishara Art Foundation, which delineates a collaborative dialogue between the late Indian-American printmaker Zarina and contemporary Pakistani artist Ali Kazim. Through the command of their respective media, a cerebral visual dialogue is staged. And what emerges may seem like separate accounts delivered from different timelines, urging each case as a shared inquiry into how meaning is formed, sustained and disseminated across surfaces, scripts and time.

Zarina’s journey through migration and belonging unfolds from the quiet ache of displacement. From this charged interior landscape, where memory meets borderlines, she turns her gaze upward. Even the moon, suspended in apparent neutrality, shifts under the weight of political geography. What should be universal becomes unsettled.

Through spare images and restrained language, she compresses archetypes without sealing them into a fixed story. The moon is no longer innocent, hovering above a world divided. And we are left to ask: how can something so constant appear unified, when the ground beneath is so divided?

Her relational connections to the world around her affirm her anxieties and present themselves as simulacra in her seminal series Home is a Foreign Place (1999), which deconstructs the spatial belonging of her own home, hinting that what you see carries other baggage.

Among the modicum of works by Zarina are a series of 10 woodcut prints inscribed with Urdu proverbs. The English translation of one of these proverbs is, “After eating nine hundred rats, the cat goes on a pilgrimage.” Yet, to render it so directly is already to diminish it. In the gallery, Urdu appears without translation, situated spatially rather than linguistically, as its literal decoding completely flattens its cultural timbre and tonal inflection.

Here, a single language does not monopolise meaning. Zarina’s refusal of redundant formal, visual or explanatory narrative becomes potent in breaking ideologies. As the Italian novelist Umberto Eco suggests, “You can cheat the given language.” In her prints, Urdu here exceeds its semantic function and becomes structural.

In these works, meaning is not delivered as a fixed message — it lingers and withholds where an expression is not descriptive but rather forces you to become. As Allama Iqbal wrote, “The ultimate aim of the ego is not to see something, but to be something.” Zarina toys with political axioms, with her views reflecting a collective memory and dialectical systems that are satirical, echoing urgencies that hint at totality at large.

Opposite Zarina’s restrained geometry, Kazim’s paintings appear materially dense, sedimented with pigment and social reference. Where Zarina reduces, Kazim accumulates.

The most direct point of convergence between the two practices emerges through a reimagining of the Alphabet Book - Urdu Qaida, prompted by Zarina’s word-based series. This engagement propelled Kazim to produce works specifically for the exhibition, drawing on letters, visual associations and, at times, the deliberate absence of language itself. In one instance, the word ‘zebra’ becomes a site of inquiry, its absence in Urdu underscoring how language reflects colonial reverberations, as the animal is not indigenous to the region.

Similarly, the works Chaand (2025) and Firefly II [Jugnoo] (2006) take luminosity as a metaphor to weave literary connections. Further references to Farid-Uddin Attar’s influential masterpiece The Conference of the Birds to the Buddhist Mara’s Army take the form of poignant moments, where Kazim uses his adeptness to render similar collective philosophies while portraying himself as a protagonist in several of his works.

At moments, the exhibition gravitates towards Kazim’s practice, showing paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints and videos transcribing worldviews that underpin his anthropological impulses, whereas Zarina’s work is the proverbial birdsong, punched with irony, tethered to ghosts of histories.

This is evident in Tteela (2025), a landscape drawing of Kazim’s village Patoki on the outskirts of Lahore, a site where remnants of the Harappan Civilisation continue to surface during the monsoon season. From this terrain, the artist gathers geological time itself, reframing those particles into a fictionalised landscape that reshapes what is lost as not erased but sedimented. It is atomised, layered, worked with aquarelle scores, where marks suggest holding history not as narrative but as weight embedded within matter. Kazim creates a sensorial pictorial tension that brings his figures to act as containers of diverse information from everyday life.

As one walks through the show, one notices that, unlike Kazim’s landscape, both artists remove the figure-ground relationship, toying with abstractions to assert their trust in the viewer to linger, to sit with uncertainty, to accept that understanding may arrive gradually, or not at all. In the case of ‘Urdu Worlds’, the curator attempts to knowingly resurface a linguistic reinstatement of a language as a script.

In places such as Dubai, this may be indirectly implicit, where Urdu is widely spoken as a diasporic dialect with shared Indo-Pak linguistic articulations, but the script largely remains estranged. It is this resurgence that makes the show plausible, even if it may arise from separate origins.

‘Urdu Worlds’ is on display at the Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai from January 16-May 31, 2026

Cover image: Hudhud (Conference of the Birds) (2022), Ali Kazim

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, March 8th, 2026

The sculpture, which depicts Christ the Saviour, has been preserved in the Basilica of Sant’Agnese fuori le mura on Rome’s ancient Via Nomentana by a Catholic religious order of canons regular.

Originally attributed to Michelangelo until the early 19th century, the work later lost its association with the Renaissance master and remained unnamed until the present day.

Italian independent researcher Valentina Salerno — a member of the Vatican committee for the celebrations marking the 500th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth — has re-attributed the sculpture to the Tuscan artist.

We have lived here since 1412, and the monumental complex of Sant’Agnese always holds surprises, this is one of them, Franco Bergamin, of the Order of Lateran Canons Regular, told a press conference.

Salerno’s research is based on long-term archival work rather than stylistic analysis alone, drawing on notarial records, posthumous inventories, and indirect correspondence linked to Michelangelo’s final years in Rome.

I am not an art historian in fact, I don’t even have a university degree but the strength of my research lies in its reliance on public archival documents, she said, describing herself as something of an investigator.

The documents challenge the long-held narrative that Michelangelo, who lived until he was 88, systematically destroyed works late in life. Instead, the sources suggest that drawings, studies, and some marble sculptures were carefully transferred within a trusted circle after the artist’s death.

“At Michelangelo’s death, every powerful ruler would have wanted to claim something of the master. But the artist carefully devised the transfer of the material in his possession so that his art could be passed on to his pupils and thus to future generations, Salerno said.

Originally published in Dawn, March 5th, 2026.

Cover photo: Reuters

The exhibition brings together paintings on canvas and wasli that rework found colonial photographs of South Asian women, set in conversation with intimate personal images drawn from the artist’s familial past. Syed uses photographs of her legendary grandmother, the singer Malika Pukhraj, who spent her later years in Lahore.

Syed spent several formative years closely attached to her and says that the photographs “represent a South Asian woman from the same era who was fierce and formidable in her strength and vulnerable and fallible in her humanness. They, thus, serve as a contrast to the denial of individuality, autonomy and agency in the colonial images.”

Syed reads violence in these images — violence through detached reflection, through distortion and erasure, through a gaze that spoke for women while denying them a voice. In her paintings, that violence is neither sensationalised nor aestheticised — it is held in tension with a repaired register.

The works on wasli are the most evident attempt to undo this damage. By reimagining it through a South Asian female gaze, Syed loosens the archival grip that once fixed these women in place. Faces gain expression rather than vacancy, and bodies shed their performative submission. The women are no longer captives to a controlling eye but conversers within a visual language that recognises them as individuals.

Syed’s long engagement with the female body — shaped by years of rigorous training under the artist Iqbal Hussain, who passed away recently, and informed by her immersion in music — rolls here with quiet confidence. The bodies in ‘All the Women in Me’ are not arranged to please. They occupy space with weight and purpose. Even when seated or motionless, they seem internally active, absorbed in private thought or reminiscence. The women are not there to be seen; they are there to be.

Colour and rhythm do much of the work. Flora and fauna appear as carriers of memory. These elements recall the orchards and animals of her grandmother’s Lahore home, and they also function symbolically, suggesting growth, interdependence and the non-human witnesses to women’s lives that archives ignore. While this exhibition is unmistakably political, the paintings do not lecture. The exhibition trusts viewers to feel their way into its arguments, to recognise the unease of the colonial image and the relief of its undoing.

Syed’s interdisciplinary practice, her scholarship, her teaching, and her deep relationship to music all quietly underwrite the exhibition. One feels the discipline of years spent drawing the human form, the patience of research and the lyricism borrowed from raga and rhythm. I imagine that the “me” of the title is not autobiographical but instead expands outwards, encompassing mothers and daughters, known women and unnamed ones, those photographed and those who escaped the lens.

In a wasli painting derived from a colonial ethnographic photograph of a seated woman, the artist pares the scene down to its essentials. The Victorian paraphernalia that once framed the subject, such as long curtains, furniture, and architectural prompts, has been stripped away. What remains is the woman, rendered with a gravity that counterattacks submission. Her eyes no longer slip past the viewer in rehearsed vacancy and instead hold a quiet, inward resolve.

The canvases based on photographs of Syed’s grandmother operate as a different chronicle altogether. Her figure fills the frames with unrepentant presence. The brushwork is emphatic but not forceful. Here, distinctiveness emphasises itself through various specifics: the tilt of the head, the compactness of the torso, the unapologetic weight of age and experience. This is not a metaphorical woman but a person whose authority derives from having lived.

Across the exhibition, moments like these accrue importance. The women are no longer frozen in time; they are allowed to exist within it. In doing so, Syed offers more than a critique of the archive. She models an alternative archival practice grounded in empathy, composition, and the determination that women’s bodies are not sites of display but storehouses of lived knowledge.

‘All the Women in Me’ was on display at Canvas Gallery, Karachi, from January 20-29, 2026.

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, March 1st, 2026

Cover image: Farazeh Syed / Instagram

“Solastalgia is a longing for the lost terrain of my soul,” Syed reflects. “In Karachi’s relentless sprawl, I find myself suspended between the concrete’s grip and the whisper of a vanishing horizon. The city’s pulse fuels my art, yet every beat echoes with what we’ve surrendered — nature’s silence, the tree’s shade, the cloud’s whisper.” His words resonate deeply in a city where unchecked development has steadily erased not only natural landscapes but also layers of history and cultural identity.

Syed is far from alone in this sense of loss. In Karachi, modernisation often proceeds without even superficial attempts at preservation. Uniform high-rises and concrete apartment blocks continue to replace neighbourhoods with distinct character, resulting in a cityscape that feels increasingly generic and alienating. This profit-driven urban expansion has drawn justified criticism for damaging both the environment and the city’s historical fabric.

As architect and planner Arif Hasan recently noted in Dawn, Karachi has built 43 flyovers in the last two decades — many of them unnecessary and politically motivated rather than technically sound — yet they have failed to resolve the city’s core infrastructural problems.

Syed’s exhibition comprises 22 works that oscillate between beauty and menace. Several pieces are visually alluring yet quietly threatening, prompting reflection on our fraught relationship with nature and the uncertain destiny of modern cities. His rosy-brown, totem-like Untitled sculptures, carved from rosewood — one of the hardest woods to work with — are particularly striking. Embedded within these vertical forms are books and six-inch rulers, seemingly swallowed by the structure, while iron rods protrude from the top, evoking the unfinished and abandoned buildings that punctuate Karachi’s skyline.

Two other Untitled works resemble framed relics, mimicking fragments of eroded heritage architecture. Made from fibreglass and sandstone, they suggest both fragility and endurance. In contrast, a seascape painting on canvas, formally framed with sandstone, is partially obscured by concrete. The implication is clear: in a city by the sea, access to the horizon is increasingly blocked by walls of ‘development’.

Syed’s pen-and-ink drawings on archival paper, all titled Solastalgia, reinforce this narrative. Composed of cubes, rectangles, and tangled forms of birds and trees, they echo the monotonous geometry of the city itself. Despite their meticulous hatching and energetic lines, the drawings carry a quiet sadness — a sense of repetition and entrapment mirroring urban life.

The exhibition ultimately gestures beyond critique toward an urgent reminder. Urban green spaces — parks, gardens and forests — are essential for air quality, temperature regulation, biodiversity, and public health. They enrich social and cultural life and make cities more humane and livable. ‘Solastalgia’ underscores the need for sustainable urban development, rooted in collaboration between planners, communities and authorities, before the city’s remaining horizons disappear entirely.

‘Solastalgia’ was on display at Chawkandi Art Gallery, Karachi from January 7-17, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, February 22nd, 2026

Figures painted on fabric emerge from a watery backdrop as if they are participants in a ghostly theatrical performance. The use of diffused light and violet monotones serves to enhance the atmospheric content of Mansoor’s paintings. The presence of a moon in the paintings suggests the time is night — a time pregnant with mystery, shadow and silvery light.

This surreal environment befits the artist’s inquiries regarding gender archetypes and behavioural tropes. Mansoor states: “I have been consumed by desire, fantasy, mirages for most of my life.” Her imagined paradisiacal garden, or gulshan as she calls it, is a liminal zone where certainty is eschewed for the creative possibilities yielded by uncertainty and indeterminism. Noor Ahmed, the curator of this exhibition, says that the work “offers a space where the viewer must sit with the ambiguity of intimacy, of memory, of becoming.”

Mansoor, in the spirit of a flaneuse, has explored city environments from which she extracts inspiration for photographs and paintings. Karachi, Lahore and Paris figure in her alert wanderings. She notices repetitions in patterns of daily life, which she draws into her whimsical gulshan. She marries the textures of society to intellectual engagement with objects such as Persian manuscripts and calligraphic works. From an array of stimuli, Mansoor distills her poetic renditions with oil paint on a variety of fabrics such as cotton toile, gauze and chiffon.

The softness of fabric is a challenge to the artist, whose hand must maintain the integrity of line and brushstroke on a pliable surface. However, the challenge is an integral part of the psychological and even psychic motivators for Mansoor’s art production, which explores shifting patterns.

Within the cavernous space of the Sanat Initiative, Mansoor has hung stretched paintings on walls. She has also painted on sections of entire bolts of cloth, which are suspended from the ceiling to the floor. On these bolts, an area of cloth at eye level has been prepared by stiffening to become a canvas for a painting. These cascading displays function dually — as surfaces for paint and as arresting vertical installations.

The paintings represent visionary, almost hallucinatory, states of mind in which the mundane and the wondrous mingle with equal status. The painting I spend this summer missing last summer shows a semi-reclined woman on a divan. A large moon looms beside her.

In the work Over our sandwich and coffee I felt something inside me for you, three female figures, with disproportionate scaling, and a sofa coexist with the omnipresent moon reduced to a tiny circle.

I have never been a bulbul of Sufi song shows a youthful figure lying on a bed while another figure, off to a side, is occupied with a utensil. The two people are seemingly oblivious to each other’s presence. Although represented on a single surface, they may well occupy different dimensions of reality.

These images may be construed as psychological statements that grapple with the nature of intimacy, of inter-human relationships that are unresolved and unformalised. By contrast, the artist has recurring props, such as the sofa/divan/couch (and occasionally a bed) that seem to offer a comforting familiarity. These domestic objects should be devoid of relationship dilemmas, but not so in the Zahra Mansoor universe.

Mansoor’s self-conscious exploration of uncertainty, which is so nuanced in her paintings, is handled more explicitly in a short film called Doomed Love Trope, which is part of the exhibition. The simple plot of the film is based on Mansoor planning her wedding to the object of her love that is a purple couch. Without revealing the denouement of the story, it is sufficient to say that this seemingly absurd premise is meant to challenge what terms such as normality and ordinariness construe for us.

An engaging catalogue accompanies the show with quirky contributions by the artist, the curator and 11 of the artist’s friends, who have taken that bold leap into philosophical uncertainty required to probe the subliminal depths of Mansoor’s lilac-tinted gulshan.

‘Fanaa is the Eclipse’ was on display at the Sanat Initiative from January 13-22, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, February 22nd, 2026

Aptly titled ‘A Search for Meaning’, this exhibition continues Kamran’s artistic journey, which has been tied to the intuitive processes of mark-making with the paintbrush, the imprint of the hand, and textured materials, and scraps of flat paper surfaces collaged onto the canvas.

The viewing was accompanied by the faint sound of Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ and ‘Violin Concerto.’ In music, adagio means ‘played slowly.’ If a string has an adagio movement, it’s a selection that’s played at a slow tempo. Similarly, viewing Kamran’s paintings is an emotionally and physically immersive experience only if we allow ourselves to be open to it, without trying to locate recognisable objects or physical forms.

The work demands mindfulness and presence to savour the forms that layer one upon the other, regardless of the association to representational elements. The rhythm of music neither reflects nor translates into the imagery, but rather what Kamran has been listening to while painting.

Abstraction allows artists to delve into the subconscious mind to guide their brushstrokes and mark-making. The liberated form enables them to tap into their innermost thoughts, resulting in works that are deeply personal and emotionally charged. There may be as many pathways to experience and interpret Kamran’s art as there are viewers, as her imagery allows introspection on a deeply personal level. The stoic stillness in the imagery suggests that she painted in the quiet of the studio. Also apparent is the light in the work, which appears to be a winter light.

The predominant yellow as an under layer in much of this body of work comes from a drive through a flaming yellow forest during autumn in eastern Canada. The colour becomes the form and determines the progression, setting a chain of aesthetic propositions, arguments and counterarguments. Kamran talks about moments where she feels lost and puts aside the canvas to work on another one, or resolves it by rotating it upside down or sideways, to explore new problems until she knows that she must move on to the next canvas.

I instantly think of my favourite artist, the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, who worked on his Women Series of paintings for six years in the 1950s. De Kooning’s broad brush strokes merged the figure and landscape — the surface pulsating with life and often tumultuous rhythm. Shapes shift and dissolve before the eyes. Kamran’s is much like a syncopated rhythm in music, which involves a variety of rhythms that are in some ways unexpected, or off-beat.

Pathways connect and disconnect, leading to an endless trail of what the artist refers to as “mistakes”. Mistakes, or irregularities that she says she enjoys. This is perhaps the core of her creative magic. She opens herself to emotions that find expression through the painterly. The ‘process’ becomes the subject. She progresses to finding depth through receding angular and linear elements, with the balance constantly tipping.

A recurring pictorial element in Kamran’s imagery is the division of space, where one side is off-centred. There is no central focus, but rather the residue of ongoing conversations. Kamran’s space conveys angst, with moments of stillness as well as a lyrical line that meanders as a connecting element. Much like the untrimmed edges of her attire that she stitches herself, her unframed canvases expose an endearing rawness. The memory of sewing goes back to her mother, who always used her needle to crochet or embroider.

There is this bare earthiness and weave of the canvas on which she opens her heart, her intuition, her dreams. There are moments of stillness akin to a meditative force, and therein she finds solace in the music of Barber and Robert Schumann.

The representational appears as a parallel thread, as illusion, such as in the work My Soul is a Woman (2025), where the faint figure appears in the form of a light, but merges with the layers of paint. It reappears in the form of a chair, alluding to a seated figure. Parts of human and animal limbs surface, entangled within a web of strokes and drips of paint.

On the other hand, the way colour arrangements and shapes visually relate to one another can be the sole concern of the abstract painter, and that is where I would look for meaning in Kamran’s art.

‘A Search for Meaning’ was on display at Canvas Gallery in Karachi from February 3-12, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, February 15th, 2026

Cover image via Canvas Gallery / Instagram

The MoU was signed on February 16 in Karachi and outlines a framework for strengthening the museum’s infrastructure, exhibition design, visitor engagement and educational outreach. In other words, the aim is not just to freshen up the walls, but to reconsider how the museum functions as a public space.

Established in 1950, the National Museum of Pakistan houses everything from Gandhara sculptures to rare manuscripts and ethnographic collections. But as museum practices evolve globally — with interactive displays, community-centred programming and research-driven curation becoming the norm — many of Pakistan’s institutions risk feeling frozen in time.

This collaboration appears to acknowledge that gap.

Under the agreement, AKU will provide technical guidance and institutional coordination for the upgradation process, drawing on its academic and research expertise. CAP, known for its work in oral history documentation and exhibition development, will bring experience in archival research and community engagement.

The initiative is also being undertaken with support from the federal government’s National Heritage and Culture Division.

CAP’s Patron-in-Chief, filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, said the museum has the potential to be “far more than a repository of artefacts”, describing it instead as a space that could actively engage young people and encourage dialogue about shared histories.

CAP President Ahsan Najmi echoed that sentiment, emphasising the organisation’s focus on participatory storytelling and documenting lived experiences. The idea, he suggested, is to make the museum experience more reflective of the diverse voices that shape Pakistan.

For AKU, the collaboration also carries an academic dimension. Vice Provost Anjum Halai noted that museums play an important role in education and said faculty and students from the university’s newly launched Faculty of Arts and Sciences will be involved in the project.

Whether this MoU translates into a visibly transformed museum — one that draws in school groups, university students and families not out of obligation but curiosity — remains to be seen. But at a time when cultural spaces often struggle for attention and funding, a partnership that combines academic research, archival expertise and government backing could be a meaningful step.

If done right, the National Museum of Pakistan might finally begin to feel less like a quiet storage room for the past and more like a space that invites people to question, learn, and participate.

Cover image via White Star / File.

It felt less like a press conference and more like walking into a gathering already alive with anticipation and Gulgee’s energy.

I took my seat along the aisle of the third row, chairs aligned neatly in rows of four on either side of the Gulgee Museum’s central seating area. On one side, stained glass and towering metal installations stood, quietly demanding attention as guests settled in for the Karachi Biennale 2027 curtain-raiser — a celebration marking 10 years of the Karachi Biennale and offering a first glimpse of what lies ahead.

Hosted on Friday by Gulgee and the event’s curator, Noor Ahmed, the evening brought together artists, critics and enthusiasts for a 77-minute preview featuring works by 72 artists from 18 countries — a prelude to Karachi Biennale 2027, scheduled to run from January 16 to 31 next year.

A decade of dialogue

The programme, hosted by KB’s new chairperson Atteqa Malik, opened with a retrospective film tracing a decade of the Biennale, reminding us of how public art interventions have gradually reshaped Karachi’s cultural landscape.

Shanaz Ramzi, stepping in as managing trustee in place of renowned curator Niilofur Farrukh, reflected on the Biennale’s larger purpose: moving art beyond decoration and into dialogue. Bringing together artists, architects and thinkers from across the world, she said, allows art to become a vehicle to “discover, discuss, and respond to accessibility” in Karachi.

“At 10 years, the Karachi Biennale Trust stands as a testament to what sustained cultural collaboration can build for a city,” she said. “As we look toward KB27, we reaffirm our commitment to making art publicly accessible while creating global conversations rooted in Karachi’s realities.”

Artistic director Bushra Hussain traced the journey of earlier editions before introducing Ahmed — the youngest curator in the Biennale’s history — describing her vision as one that balances continuity with experimentation.

Ahmed framed the upcoming edition through its theme, Aaj aur Kal: Yesterday/Today/Tomorrow.

“Karachi Biennale 2027 with its theme Kal: Yesterday and Tomorrow, positions Karachi not merely as a backdrop but as a protagonist in the global conversation on art and its responsibilities,” she said.

“The thematic of the Biennale invokes the hope of a first journey but redirects this first journey away from conquest and commerce towards inclusivity and imagination. This is not a voyage of return to an originary past but of departure into the possible futures.”

Even amid ecological precarity, she added, Karachi remains a “locus of invention,” with exhibitions planned across public spaces, ports and parks, celebrating diasporic exchanges, indigenous knowledge and the languages and skills of the sea.

Adding to her remarks, Gulgee described Aaj aur Kal as an exhibition of performance art, new media and installation, inviting audiences to move through works shaped by time.

“These performative works, all happening simultaneously today, speak of rituals, relationships, narratives, and hierarchies. They channel memories of yesterday as well as fears and dreams of tomorrow,” he said, before inviting guests to explore the museum.

Walking through time

The exhibition unfolded like a tasting menu — brief encounters hinting at something far greater to come.

My walk began in the side gallery with Lahore-based artist Zantiana Iqbal’s unsettling performance installation, where she appeared as a feline body crowned with a human head — an image reminiscent of Mumtaz Begum, the Karachi Zoo’s infamous half-human, half-fox.

In the main gallery, works by local and international artists — Danish Raza, Heide Hatry, Veera Rustomji and Thailand’s Natthaphone Chaiworawat — unfolded simultaneously. Chaiworawat’s instructional performance Living Trace, Think Out Loud lingered longest in memory as he scattered handwritten reflections while repeating “Action, reaction,” turning cause and effect into a rhythmic mantra, walking through the two-floored Gulgee Museum constantly.

Elsewhere, Rumana Husain’s Mai jo Ghaggo — Legend of the Red Dress drew viewers into a slower rhythm. Draped in a red dress with a black chunri draped around her and seated amid portraits of women in crimson, she narrated an interactive story, pulling objects in her story from a chunri bag beside her, evoking the intimacy of a woman telling stories to her gathered grandchildren.

Every room carried its own sensory identity. Sound and scent guided movement as much as sight: bukhoor in one space, motia in another, henna lingering elsewhere.

Artist Meher Afroz, who was born in Lucknow in 1948, had a visual-sound installation, Meher ki Kahani, which felt like stepping into memory itself; silver paandaans and vessels arranged like relics, while the fragrance of motia lingered in the air.

The exhibition also extended beyond physical walls through livestreamed performances, including Satadru Sovan Banduri’s Cartography of the In-Between, where his body’s interaction with wilderness reflected on landscapes altered by development.

Itinerant performers moved through the museum, drawing the viewers to pause and pay attention. Kathak dancer and activist Sheema Kirmani, performing Aaj aur Kal, crossed rooms chanting “No to hate,” while British artist Anne Wood’s violin performance Fiddle Talk conversed wordlessly with passing audiences.

A taste before the feast

Seventy-seven minutes passed quickly — deliberately so.

The experience felt like sampling a feast still being prepared: 72 distinct works, each evoking a different emotion, thought or memory. There was simply too much to stay with for long. Moving from room to room, trying to see everything meant never fully settling into one piece.

At first, the pace felt frustrating.

But walking away, that restlessness transformed into hunger, a desire to return, to spend more time, to sit longer with the works glimpsed only briefly.

And perhaps that was the point. Not completion, but anticipation.

A reminder that this was only the prelude.

Under Karrar’s guest curatorship, and the artistic direction of Natasha Ginwala, the festival’s exhibitions, performances and talks were an experiment in attunement.

Rhythm Alliances dispersed itself throughout the city’s fabric. Hence, to experience the festival and reach its various venues was to crisscross Colombo itself, moving between neighbourhoods and atmospheres in a curatorial decision that feels perfectly aligned with its theme.

Upon arriving at the gallery, I found Karrar waiting for me near the threshold between the courtyard and the exhibition space, as though positioned deliberately between outside and in, between city and curatorial proposition. If rhythm is the theme, then this first encounter of ours felt like an overture.

I’d first heard of Karrar back when she was faculty of the Visual Arts department at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS) in Karachi and chief curator at IVS Gallery, and. She’s been forging quite the path since. She’s now based in Germany as the curator at SAVVY Contemporary: The Laboratory of Form-Ideas, Berlin. I asked her what it had been like to manage her work in Berlin while spearheading Colomboscope in another part of the world, but she appeared rather unfazed by the scale of what she had pulled off.

Her conceptual framing for this year’s Colomboscope positioned rhythm as a way of listening to under-heard stories of migration, labour and oceanic exchange. Rhythm, in her words, reverberates “across generations and geographies, carried by oceanic flows”.

Karrar’s curatorial strategy was both expansive and precise: expansive in drawing linkages across continents and precise in selecting artists whose practices embody rhythm as lived experience.

And in order to experience Karrar’s expansive precision, I was getting a tour of the venues and the artworks they house from the curator herself.

Cartographies of loss

Barefoot Gallery is, as Karrar also pointed out to me, reminiscent in spirit to Karachi’s Koel Gallery, functioning simultaneously as a gallery space, eatery and seller of artisanal creations.

Upstairs, Saadia Mirza’s multi-channel video and spatial sound installation A Phenomenology of Iceberg Collisions unfolded like a geological séance. Reconstructing the rupture of B15, the world’s largest recorded iceberg, the work compressed two years of seismic recordings into a 10-minute sensory encounter. Radar imagery flickered across overlapping projections, their edges colliding like tectonic plates. Sonic frequencies brought to life subterranean ruptures, as Mirza’s powerful installation mapped critical cartographies forever transformed in the wake of man-made catastrophes.

Elsewhere in the gallery, Taiwanese artist Charwei Tsai drew upon the techniques employed in writing Buddhist sutras to impressive use in her meditative and cyclical Sky Dancers series. Circles with defined centres radiated outward like tree rings, symbolising, at face value, the enlightenment and unity of all things espoused in Buddhist philosophy. However, much to my fascination, Tsai told me over dinner later that night that the concentric forms could equally evoke the act of circling the Holy Kaaba.

Next to her work in the gallery was Nepalese artist Mekh Limbu’s Chotlung: Traversing Spirits, Redemptive Songs, which centred weaving as embodied recall. Belonging to the Adibasi-Janajati Yakthung (Limbu) community, Limbu foregrounded textile traditions practised by generations of Yakthung women. The handwoven pieces, some previously carried in demonstrations against state-backed hydropower dams and infrastructural incursions, hung alongside video documentation as weaving became both archive and an act of revolt.

After viewing the works at the gallery, Karrar insisted I grab some lunch. As we were to be hopping from one Colomboscope venue to the next, I was going to need the energy.

The seen and unseen

On Chatham Street, Radicle Gallery hosted dialogues that felt explicitly trans-regional. Naiza Khan presented audio installations Durbeen and Batticaloa Justice Walk. Durbeen reconstructed tenuous nexuses of mobility and exchange through field recordings, protest songs and spoken recollections, acting as a sound collage that traced exchange across coasts.

In the gallery’s basement was Seher Shah’s deeply alluring Woven Nights, a series of concertina books composed of monotypes and shadow prints. Installed in the shape of undulating waves, the pages, and the markings on them hovered between presence and disappearance. Shah’s intimate grammar registered rhythm through interval and silence.

Alongside this, her text-based work Between a Home and a Horizon shared her observations during her time spent living in New Delhi. What was particularly revealing in her writings was her invocation of a Mughal-era Urdu genre of poetry known as Shahr-i-Ashob, which poets have employed over the centuries to lament a city’s misfortune.

Fittingly, her writing mourned the political and ideological downturns that she witnessed in India, as a sort of quiet elegy for a New Delhi that once was.

Rhythm as resistance

Built from repurposed concrete blocks, and equipped with water pools and a vinyl library, Soul Studio is an intimate sonic refuge. This was where the South African researcher and DJ Atiyyah Khan presented A Journey into the Sun, rooted in her long-term research into As-Shams Records. Founded in Johannesburg in 1974 by Rashid Vally, the independent music label gave a platform to anti-apartheid jazz, nurturing artists such as Dollar Brand, later known as Abdullah Ibrahim. In fact, Rashid’s record shop, Kohinoor, became a hub for creatives and music enthusiasts alike.

Atiyyah’s immersive sound environment distilled years of archival research into a resonant reminder that jazz functioned as a form of cross-racial solidarity forged under oppression in South Africa. By tracing migrations, both forced and voluntary, from South Asia to South Africa, her project perfectly encapsulated Colomboscope’s transoceanic imagination. Rhythm here was a social adhesive that held communities together against the violence of segregation.

Rooms of remembering

Our next stop was Colpetty Town House, which delivered some of the festival’s most emotionally resonant works. Pakistani artist Jovita Alvares’s installation unpacked the impact of Portuguese colonisation in Goa and the ruptures of Partition. Karachi’s Goan community became her lens in the work Re: cite, member, sist, in which she constructed a domestic setting brimming with “intergenerational memory”.

She incorporated tracings of her grandmother’s embroidery patterns onto cushions and curtains, transforming domestic objects into mnemonic devices. Seeing her work, I was reminded of her exhibition at Karachi’s Canvas Gallery, Goa last night I dreamed I touched you… today it dissipates, which was, fittingly enough, also curated by Karrar.

On the ground floor of Colpetty Town House, Sri Lankan artist-duo Tashyana Handy and Sakina Aliakbar’s For Private View and Public Disappearance meticulously reconstructed a young woman’s bedroom. The work was so evocatively constructed that one could imagine it being any girl’s bedroom, so much so that it reminded me of my older sister’s chaotic room during her teen years.

The installation unfolded as what the artists described as an “intuitive and emotional archive”, with mundane objects carrying the weight of grief, love, debt and friendship. A line scrawled on the shelf read: “Do not make that house your home, it is not.” Placed next to the window of the townhouse so that passersby could peer in, the bedroom staged the tension between private interiority and public performance/scrutiny, particularly for young women.

And from here, as I looked out the window, Karrar was already hailing a tuk-tuk to take us to our next and final stop.

The last picture show

In a scurry, we arrived at Rio Complex, a former mid-century cinema marred during the Black July anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983. Here, cinematic memory was palpable, thus making this charged space ideal for Basir Mahmood’s electrifying A Body Bleeds More Than It Contains.

Mahmood spent years engaging with ‘background’ actors, musicians and technicians from Lollywood’s dilapidated film ecosystem. Following the partial demolition of Lahore’s iconic Bari Studios in order to make way for yet another housing project, his multimedia installation used the defunct studio as a backdrop to put those long relegated to the background front and centre.

The work acted as a living archive and ode to the people behind the movies. At one point in the video, a man was shot and a filmy gush of blood erupted forth from his chest. He was dead and, along with him, the once-imperious film studio he devoted his life to.

Listening as alliance

As we departed from the Rio Complex, just as the sun started to set, it was evident to me that Karrar wanted Colomboscope’s ninth edition to favour resonance over empty spectacle. By spreading itself across Colombo’s architecture and histories, Rhythm Alliances transformed the city into an instrument, as each venue operated in a different register, with Karrar at the helm as the maestro.

Cover photo by Sanjaya Mendis

Pakistan is home to more than 13,000 glaciers, the largest number outside the polar regions (this revised glacier inventory was released in late 2024). However, many of them are rapidly melting, an unspoken fact that hangs heavily in the air.

These large-scale collages set the tone for ‘Alchemy of Becoming’, Sarah Ahmad’s compelling solo exhibition at Koel Gallery, curated by Professor Naazish Ata-Ullah. The exhibition brings together a body of work reflecting Ahmad’s engagement with transformation of landscapes, materials, memory and the self against a backdrop of ecological fragility and displacement.

Born in Lahore and now based in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the US, Ahmad is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses drawing, collage, installation and site-responsive work. Since completing her MFA from the Memphis College of Art, Tennessee, in 2015, Ahmad’s work has been included in 60 group exhibitions, 18 solo shows, and several museum exhibitions and public art projects.

Her art frequently addresses nature, migration, healing and interconnectedness, weaving together geometry, cosmology and pattern. The sense of inhabiting multiple terrains — physical, emotional and cultural — runs throughout the exhibition. Ahmad’s work often occupies a liminal space, akin to the concept of barzakh: a threshold, an in-between state, a place of pause and transition rather than arrival.

Displacement forms a quiet but insistent undercurrent. Ahmad does not present catastrophe as spectacle. Instead, she allows its effects to surface gradually through fractured forms, layered surfaces, and repeated acts of reconstruction. Ahmad explains that a “direct, visceral experience of place… my experience of the landscapes is an essential part of my work.” This includes her photographic documentation of these places.

The exhibition asks viewers to reflect on how climate change, forced migration and environmental degradation shape communities and landscapes in interconnected ways. Central to the show is the metaphor of alchemy, not merely the historical quest to turn base metals into gold, but as a process of purification, transformation and renewal. Gold leaf appears repeatedly, marking wounds, suturing breaks and suggesting regeneration amid loss.

Works such as Fractured Cosmos III and Fractured Alchemy unfold like stages in an alchemical cycle. Burnt edges, laser-etched marks, fragmented imagery and reassembled forms evoke processes of dissolution and reconstitution. Hints of floral motifs, cosmic diagrams and landscape references hover within the compositions, resisting fixed interpretation. Ahmad’s mark-making feels intuitive yet deliberate, balancing experimentation with a deep-rooted allegiance to pattern.

That allegiance, as artist Salima Hashmi notes, seems almost hereditary, drawn from embroidery, tilework and textile traditions. It surfaces most poignantly in the site-responsive installations incorporating embroidered Hunza caps. Traditionally made by women, these colourful caps stand in for absent bodies and disrupted lives, referencing the 2010 Attabad landslide in Gilgit-Baltistan. The disaster submerged a village, erased livelihoods, and reshaped the landscape, later romanticised and repackaged through tourism, while the displaced communities receded from public memory.

In Acts of Disappearance, these caps mark sites of erasure while simultaneously reclaiming them. The work honours women’s labour, indigenous knowledge and the earth itself as a source of sustenance. “Disappearance” here extends beyond ecology to include silenced activists, marginalised communities and invisible labour. Yet, the exhibition resists despair. Through repetition, craft and careful placement, Ahmad gestures towards resilience and continuity.

Another striking series, Parwaaz, takes the form of birds fashioned from collaged photographs of the Passu Glacier. Printed with archival inks and touched with gold leaf, these hybrid forms suggest both flight and fragility — landscape transformed into living metaphor.

‘Alchemy of Becoming’ ultimately insists on transformation as an ongoing process rather than a resolved state. It rewards slow looking, inviting viewers to consider what it means to inhabit a world where landscapes are changing, histories are layered and hope, like gold, must often be patiently forged from fragments.

‘Alchemy of Becoming’ was on display at Koel Gallery, Karachi from January 8-28, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, February 1st, 2026

This binding thread seemed rather fitting given that Colombo was the location for The Current V: Ancestral Ocean’s inaugural convening, Marine Intersections and Coastlines as Webs, led by celebrated curator Natasha Ginwala.

An initiative of the Spain-based international art and cultural foundation TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary’s TBA21—Academy, and taking place alongside the Colomboscope arts festival, this convening explored cultural languages, maritime stories and marine historiographies prevalent in and across the Indian Ocean. This central theme is a prescient one, particularly for those of us belonging to the ‘Global South’.

Which is why it is all the more crucial that the guest curator of this year’s Colomboscope, Hajra Haider Karrar, understands so intimately how this central theme relates to ‘our part of the world.’ Karrar — who established her curatorial practice in Pakistan and is now based in Germany as the curator at SAVVY Contemporary: The Laboratory of Form-Ideas, Berlin — has a long and continued engagement with the Indian Ocean and coastal geographies. This has also been one of the key entry points for her work on this edition of Colomboscope, hence making TBA21’s involvement here even more relevant.

So, for a few days in January, Colombo became a harbour for a trans-oceanic gathering, inviting participants to move through Colombo’s ports, wetlands and cultural spaces and treat them as living archives.

The convening’s round of talks at Radicle Gallery, housed in a colonial-era building, saw Ginwala touch upon “water bankruptcy” and other concerns being faced by communities whose livelihood is centred around the Indian Ocean in her opening remarks. This thread was poignantly carried forward in one of the sessions that followed titled Artist Encounters Across Coastal Spheres.

This conversation between artists Naiza Khan and Charwei Tsai, moderated by Karrar, traced affinities between distant coastlines marked by dispossession and resilience. Both artists have long worked with island geographies: Naiza has incorporated Pakistan’s Manora Island into many of her works, and Tsai has done the same with Taiwan’s Lanyu Island.

Naiza’s filmic installation Sticky Rice and Other Stories, partly screened during this session, showcased several artisans on Manora Island creating models of various historical boats from the region. Her work provided a window into an art form and way of life that is slowly eroding. She spoke about how Sufi shrines, a church, a Hindu temple and a Sikh gurdwara have all coexisted on Manora Island.

But the evolving indigenous relation to the coastline is now under threat due to climate change — a phenomenon Pakistan is all too familiar with. Speaking of ritual, cartography and the slow violence of climate change, both Naiza and Tsai modelled precisely the kind of cross-coastal thinking the convening sought to cultivate.

In a similar vein, the screening of Fana Fraser’s video work Nesting provided a powerful reminder of the ecologies that are currently under threat across the Indian Ocean. Drawing on the migratory life of leatherback turtles, Fraser’s choreography wove Black Atlantic histories into Indian Ocean imaginaries, suggesting that these waters are interconnected theatres of displacement and survival.

This balance between the conceptual and the applied continued in On Ports as Portals, Coasts as Companions, a conversation between academics Laleh Khalili and Dr Neelima Jeychandran, moderated by Setareh Noorani. Here, the Indian Ocean emerged as a dense mesh of labour routes, devotional networks and logistical infrastructures. Khalili’s work on maritime economies and Dr Jeychandran’s research on Malabar coast histories wrestled with the romantic vision of oceanic cosmopolitanism.

The sea, they reminded the audience, is as much a site of militarisation and debt as of exchange and belonging. This point was affirmed by Naiza, when she spoke of how Manora Island has, over the years, become increasingly militarised due to its use as a naval base.

But lived experience was just as important at this convening as discourse. This was exemplified by the Arka Kinari: a 60-tonne sailing ship built in 1947 that now sails across the world as a “laboratory of sustainability”.

While the ship was docked at Colombo’s Port City, Arka Kinari’s crew members Raka Ibrahim, Grey Filastine and Nova Ruth spoke about the ship’s voyage across international waters in its quest to promote environmental sustainability. Having begun its journey in 2019, the ship has already sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean and now, having visited Sri Lanka, will be heading to India next.

Meanwhile, South African sound researcher Atiyyah Khan led Rotations of Bismillah at Colombo’s Soul Studio. In her investigation of As-Shams Records, a small but significant Cape Town label that functioned in the shadow of apartheid, Atiyyah uncovered a layered cultural history.

Drawing on personal and archival research, she mapped the journeys that carried communities from South Asia to South Africa through systems of migrations and colonial indenture, and considered how those movements shaped new forms of belonging. Within this landscape, jazz emerged in her work as a shared language that enabled unexpected alliances to flourish during a time defined by rigid racial boundaries.

Part listening session, part archival workshop, Atiyyah’s pedagogy invited participants to handle materials, hear field recordings and reflect on archival sounds. It was here that the ethos of “deep listening” felt most genuinely enacted, in large part due to Atiyyah’s infectious enthusiasm for her subject matter.

On the other hand, Berlin-based sound artist Joseph Kamaru, better known as KMRU, provided a more atmospheric and abstract musical experience at the Musicmatters Soundroom. His work L25 unfolded as an immersive study in field recordings gathered across the Indian Ocean. The work resisted narrative clarity, and its refusal of easy representation mirrored the convening’s broader insistence that oceans cannot be neatly translated into language.

The convening also grounded participants in the ecology of Colombo. A guided wetland walk at the Beddagana Wetland Park, conceived by biologists Anjallee Prabhakaran and Anya Ratnayaka of Small Cat Advocacy and Research, introduced visitors to the remarkable biodiversity of the city’s urban wetlands. From housing migratory birds to Asian water monitors, the park exemplified why safeguarding the natural habitats that the Indian Ocean gives rise to is vital.

Evidently, the convening wished to treat the ocean as an active interlocutor of stories — regardless of whether those stories came from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, or any other land touched by the wide embrace of the Indian Ocean. The programme’s structure, acting as part symposium, part workshop and part performance series, mirrored its thesis that coastlines are webs rather than borders.

The climatic conundrums we in Pakistan are facing are the same ones our neighbours are confronted with. In light of this shared plight, TBA21’s convening sought to propose a method for thinking and gathering in an age of ecological uncertainty. Through art, conversations, workshops and walks, it imagined the Indian Ocean as an ancestral commons that is layered with violence, beauty and, above all, hope.

Cover: Atiyyah Khan’s Rotations of Bismillah. Photo by Ryan Wijayaratne

Presented by Mumbai-based gallery Chemould Prescott Road, the large wall-based photomontage is composed of hundreds of sequential stills taken from an open-source CCTV camera in Gaza. The footage documents a single night of Israeli bombardment in the spring of 2025, showing a near-black sky intermittently punctured by flashes of white, red and orange as rockets streak across the frame and explode.

According to a collaborative post by the Beaconhouse National University Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts and Design and Rashid Rana Studio on Instagram, Fractured Moment constructs the illusion of a single suspended instant, rendering the night sky over Gaza on an immersive scale. Drawing conceptual lineage from Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, Rana reworks its austere gravity into a field of darkness repeatedly ruptured by airstrikes.

While the image appears still, time remains embedded within it, as the camera records each passing second, turning the starless expanse into a study of endurance shaped by absence and loss. The work is being presented as a solo booth by Chemould Prescott Road.

Priced at $30,000, all proceeds from the sale of the art are earmarked for Gaza relief organisations selected by Chemould Prescott Road’s director, Shireen Gandhy, in consultation with Palestinian community workers. The gallery first debuted the installation in June 2025 at Frieze’s No 9 Cork Street exhibition space in London.

Rana acknowledged the risks involved in representing violence through art, particularly the “potential risk in aestheticising horrific incidents, like the atrocities taking place in Gaza”, but asserted, according to The Art Newspaper, that “when stories take the form of art, they become more noticeable”. His use of the CCTV emphasises how “readily available” evidence of Israel’s brutality is. “It’s right there for anyone to witness,” he added.

The installation’s presentation in Doha comes amid heightened regional tensions. Israel-Qatar relations have been under scrutiny in the lead-up to Art Basel Doha, particularly following Israel’s missile strike in September 2025 in Doha — its first such strike in Qatar — which killed six people and was condemned by the Qatari government as a terrorist attack.

Security concerns across the Gulf have also intensified in recent weeks, with threats of further regional escalation and several international airlines suspending flights to parts of the Middle East. Art Basel, in a statement shared by The New York Times, said it is closely monitoring developments in coordination with its Qatari partners and is proceeding with the fair as planned, citing the safety and well-being of its community as a priority.

Despite the uncertainty, exhibitors and artists have continued to arrive in Doha. Gandhy told the outlet that Rana had already travelled to Qatar for the installation of the work. “The art world needs to speak out,” she said, adding that Art Basel Doha has encouraged galleries to present works that engage directly with difficult contemporary issues.

Palestine is no longer a marginal or abstract issue within international art spaces. Israel’s actions in Gaza have been documented by journalists, human rights organisations and the United Nations, which has acknowledged war crimes and warned of acts amounting to genocide.

Qatar supports full Palestinian sovereignty and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, while also playing a central role in mediation efforts between Palestine and Israel.

Gaza has been subjected to sustained Israeli military assault since October 7. According to Gaza’s local health authorities, more than 71,000 Palestinians have been killed since, many of them women and children.

Art Basel Doha runs from February 5 to 7, with preview days held on February 3 and 4.

Cover via Rashid Rana Studio/Instagram

For a long time, it had been my wish to interview her and review her solo body of work, but I never had the opportunity. Hence, there was no second thought when I received a personal invitation to attend her exhibition at Rohtas 2 Gallery, Lahore, which also marked the celebration of her birthday.

When I ask Hashmi how her journey as an artist began, she reflects on her childhood and the people who shaped her early life, “I was a reticent child, so drawing became a refuge, though I didn’t realise it would become my career path. I always knew I wanted to teach.”

Later, at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, it became clear that her future lay in the art and design fields that she had always seen as being deeply intertwined.

Hashmi’s father, the renowned poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, was a profound influence on her. “His life was mirrored in his poetry, which became my own experience of life,” she says, before quoting him: “‘My people are the whole of mankind.’” Reflecting on the impact his words had on others, she adds, “It helped me understand the artist’s role, as he saw it, as the voice of the people.

“My father was always a guiding presence, a touchstone of values, and so was my mother — a strong woman who supported him when others left. We were a close yet expansive family. My parents and my constant exposure to creative people — artists, musicians and poets — had the strongest influence on me.”

Hashmi recalls being politically conscious from an early age, though she says her distinct voice and style evolved naturally. Her major concerns took shape in her forties, during Gen Ziaul Haq’s era, when she realised that her “voice was also the voice of others.” Her work confronts patriarchy and social injustice, placing women’s experiences of resistance and survival at the centre, while also addressing the plight of innocents such as Palestinians. For her, art is not merely decorative — it is a form of protest and a call for change.

Hashmi discovered her favourite collage medium during her student years in England, through her teachers Adrian Heath and Howard Hodgkin. “I enjoyed it immediately,” she says. Though trained in classical techniques and the study of old masters, she found collage and mixed media more natural and expressive: “From ink and charcoal to acrylic, powdered pigment and bits of paper, I collect from all over the world, everything can become part of my work.”

Our conversation broadened when I asked about the art scene in the region. “It’s not surprising,” she says, “that when everything seems dark, it is often the poet, the painter, the musician, the creative voice that sustains people’s imagination.”

Her work certainly does that. But, upon entering Rohtas 2 Gallery, one notices a shift in Hashmi’s work toward a more personal, intimate exploration of self and the human experience. The works on display trace a significant span of her artistic journey, marking a time period from 2010 to the present, reflecting how personal memories, solitude and separations have shaped her practice.

The Sunless Light series was developed during her recent visits to Sri Lanka for Ayurveda treatment. There, hours spent in solitude amid scenic surroundings allowed her to focus, reflect and “discover an inner light.” The series partly pays tribute to painter Zahoorul Ikhlaq’s Sunless Days but moves in a more introspective direction, exploring her evolving relationship with herself and her environment.

Executed on indigo-dyed handmade paper, works such as Sunless Light XV use diptych compositions: a vast ultramarine field evokes night skies or waves, while the other panel features delicate forms of paper, threads and paint — suggestive of drifting coastlines, inspired by her surroundings.

Hashmi notes that her engagement with abstract landscapes deepened during her time in the US, where homesickness heightened her awareness of her immediate surroundings. She records these observations in notebooks, which are also displayed at the exhibition.

In The Letters of Your Name I and II, using photographs, collage, charcoal and graphite, she turns to a personal subject: her husband Shoaib Hashmi and their grandson Faiz. On the other hand, A River Dies of Thirst references the violence in Gaza, while The Family series reflects on isolation during Covid through masked family portraits and collaged images.

But despite her continued prolificacy, Hashmi quips, “My greatest accomplishment is still being sane at my age.”

Salima Hashmi’s open studio was held at Rohtas 2 Gallery, Lahore, from December 14, 2025, to January 15, 2026.

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, January 25th, 2026

Belonging to a family of courtesans, he grew up in the red light area, which was the subject of much of his work.

His paintings, often dubbed contentious and controversial in life, are being remembered by admirers as honest, profound and fearless in the wake of his passing.

This was illustrated by an incident, reported in Dawn, when his oil paintings depicting the women of the red light district were not allowed to be exhibited at the Alhamra Gallery. Hussain, nonetheless, decided to exhibit his work on the footpath. This event in itself became breaking news in Pakistan’s art world, later propelling him to international fame.

An alumnus of the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, Hussain went on to teach at the prestigious school and inspire many young artists inside and outside the classroom.

Tributes began pouring in on Friday from artists, media personalities and organisations he had worked with. Journalist Raza Rumi posted on X, saying the artist “gave dignity to lives often pushed to the margins” and “painted Lahore as it truly is”.

Journalist Fifi Haroon joined in with an Instagram post saying Hussain’s trajectory was of such “depth and profundity” that it demanded to be embraced and shared. She shared her own experience admiring his work at the iconic Cooco’s Den restaurant the artist opened in Lahore’s Walled City.

Photographer Mobeen Ansari recalled having met Hussain twice, once to photograph him for a book and later to present him the finished work. Ansari said the artist was “usually a quiet individual, but his paintings spoke so loudly”.

“It is a huge loss for the art world,” he wrote in his tribute post. “He painted Lahore in all its glory and painted the ever changing seasons of its landmarks, and inspired many artists to get into NCA and study painting — and his boldness truly inspired many to find the courage to tell their stories and push the envelope. He was always deemed the most controversial artist — as he humanised taboo subjects — and through his paintings he told stories of sadness and less glamorous reality of Heera Mandi — the red light district in Lahore, where he grew up. He used his art to support his community.”

Sameera Raja, the founder and curator of Karachi’s Canvas Art Gallery, recalled studying under Hussain’s tutelage at NCA. “His honesty, courage and deep connection to his world left a lasting imprint, on his students, his viewers and on me personally,” she wrote.

Celebrity hairstylist Tariq Amin shared a picture of one of Hussain’s works, ‘Mother and Child’. The painting, Amin wrote, was a gift for his wife and newborn daughter from the artist.

“A pleasure to have met Iqbal Hussain sahib many years ago and falling in love with his unique art … This painting was a perfect present and we have cherished it immensely. Memories associated with him and his work which will live on forever…”

Cultural institutions posted condolences, including the Pakistan National Council of the Arts and the AlHamra Arts Council in Lahore.

Art galleries also paid tribute at the maestro’s passing, with Canvas Art Gallery calling him a “fiercely honest and deeply human voice in Pakistani art”. Art House in London said Hussain’s work was “grounded in truth — direct, unsentimental, and uncompromising”.

Islamabad’s Satrang Gallery highlighted his “profound impact on Pakistani art,” saying “his unique expression of the human experience will be deeply missed,” while the Vasl Artists Association called him a “legendary figure in the country’s art history”.

With his passing, Hussain leaves behind a chasm in Pakistan’s art scene, a voice for those whose voices are shunned has himself gone silent forever. The artist will forever be remembered for his brave expression.

Cover photo via Ejaz Art Gallery

It is fascinating to see the traditional art form of embroidery re-emerging today and gaining renewed appreciation, especially in the art world, for its beauty, precision and expressive potential. Ahwar Nasir’s artwork ‘Nano’s Secret Store’ is an example of an artwork that is re-engaging with this tradition.

With the textured surface of thread embroidery on cotton, she depicts stories hidden within everyday objects: folded and unfolded clothes and items scattered across Nano’s personal or intimate interior — possibly a storage space. The piled fabrics become metaphors for layered memories and personal histories. The title hints at nostalgia and the quiet intimacy of a space where a loved one’s life story is stored piece by piece.

Her second piece of embroidery on calico, titled ‘Always in Transit’, also celebrates nostalgia. A cluster of luggage — perhaps a life — locked inside suitcases and boxes appears to be waiting for travel, migration or departure.

With a surrealist approach, Hafsa Sarfraz’s ’Chamber of Quiet Offerings’ depicts a grayscale composition accompanied by a red pomegranate suspended in air, symbolising a long-awaited wish or dream and the possibility of fertility or growth. Two separated chairs, positioned beneath a clock frozen in time, evoke a profound stillness and suggest silence, nostalgia and the emotional pause that lingers between people and moments. The sleeping cat acts as a quiet mediator within the scene, softening the tension of silence and serving as a symbolic guardian of the space.

Drawing inspiration from dot painting — an art form that emerged in 1971 — ‘Untitled’ by Maseerah Abdul Razzaque is a richly textured work filled with small biomorphic shapes: petal-like clusters, rounded forms and leaf motifs that visually echo the idea of complexity emerging through multiplicity.

In Uzma Bhatti’s ‘Untitled’, intricate pen work radiates from a dense central cluster, suggesting identities — or natural elements — splintering, merging and evolving at once. Meanwhile, Qaiser Khan’s drawing features abstract, intertwined ribbon-like forms that fold into one another, each suggesting a distinct yet inseparable psychological or emotional layer.

Mufakhar Subhani’s ‘Jaan Deyo Saddi Varri Aan Deyo’ mocks the relentless lust for power and the cyclical obedience that sustains it. At the centre sits a surreal hare, a clever ruler comfortably enjoying his authority on the throne, unwilling to leave the seat he occupies. In front of him stand two human figures — one fully rendered and adorned in traditional clothing, the other a stark white silhouette, an intentional absence. Both wait obediently for their turn to claim the crown.

Rendered in a monochromatic palette, Mutaib Shah’s ‘The Angry Crow’ suggests warning, watchfulness and conflict. The work shows two horned beasts, positioned on a map-like structure, caught in an intense moment of confrontation or entanglement. The imagery suggests themes of displacement, boundaries, conflict and the struggle to claim one’s place — whether literal or metaphorical.

In Sumaira Amin’s ‘Untitled’, the warm brown silhouette appears to interact with, or perhaps reveal, the serene framed scene rendered in a traditional miniature painting style. As the silhouette extends into the frame, it generates a dynamic visual tension that bridges two distinct spaces within the work. The result is a visually poetic exploration of both cultural and personal narratives.

Rabia Mushkur’s ‘Beauty in Silence’ admires quiet moments of introspection and reflects emotional terrains. The earthy browns, soft greys and washed-out whites create a serene yet dramatic environment.

Sadaf Zeeshan’s ‘Becoming of Line-Horizon’ — a canvas divided diagonally into two intense, opposing zones — creates an immediate sense of tension and movement, resembling two powerful forces in collision or contrasting emotional states. Layered with paper on white glue, doodled over and finished with thick, hand-applied paint, the work suggests a therapeutic release for bottled-up emotions.

Unfolding Identities was on display at ArtCiti Gallery, Karachi from November 20 to 25, 2025.

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, December 28th, 2025

Lines and Language, Rabeya Jalil’s solo exhibition at Canvas Gallery, is firmly of the latter kind. It draws viewers into an active engagement with how we read, misread and internalise visual information. Spirited yet thoughtful, intuitive yet analytical, this body of work examines mark-making not merely as expression, but as a system that can be dismantled and rebuilt with new intent.

The curatorial statement notes that the show “critiques a visual language system, identifying connections and challenging the binaries of the serious and the satirical, of high and low art, and of the values associated with cultivated and uncultivated taste.” Jalil uses these binaries only to undo them. Her works mingle the playful with the rigorous, the spontaneous with the structured, the academic with the everyday. In dissolving hierarchies of taste, she raises the question: who decides what is ‘sophisticated’, and what is dismissed as ‘naïve’ or ‘uncultivated’?

Her explorations here echo the impulses seen in her 2018 solo exhibition at Koel Gallery, where I described her work as infused with “raw energy” and a desire “to move towards abstraction.” That exhibition, with its tense figures, fragmented anatomies and nervy lines, revealed an artist already questioning conventional modes of representation. In Lines and Language, those earlier instincts are refined into a more deliberate, layered inquiry that is still bold, but now anchored in a clearer structural logic.

Jalil’s sensibility is inseparable from her dual role as artist and educator. Currently Head of Painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore and co-founder of the Journal of Art and Design Education Pakistan, she consistently advocates for widening the discourse of art in Pakistan. This exhibition, too, extends that commitment: it invites a broader, more democratic understanding of how visual languages operate.

Stepping into Lines and Language feels like entering a landscape built from marks. Jalil’s lines loop, hesitate, collide and sometimes dissolve entirely. They echo chalkboards, children’s drawings, proto-symbols and modernist abstraction. Many works carry the atmosphere of a learning space: responses, corrections, erasures.

‘Animal Play’ pulses with this energy. Its creatures, drawn in swift, restless strokes, occupy a space between innocence and instinct. Conversely, ‘Fifty-Six Cousins’, a grid of distorted faces, becomes a catalogue of fleeting emotions. Each square is a quick study, imperfect and expressive. Taken together, they form a fragmented community of human feeling.

Colour provides another grammar in Jalil’s visual language. Bold fields, sharp contrasts and assertive blocks of pigment guide the viewer across layers of interpretation. Grids and repeated motifs establish order, while sudden gestural interruptions break that order apart.

A quieter but striking work, ‘Lipsticks’, operates like an archaeological surface of everyday gestures. Each tile carries an imprint of use and routine and the title nudges the viewer to consider femininity as a coded language, constructed from repeated, ordinary actions that accumulate into meaning.

Humour also threads gently through the exhibition. It appears not as exaggeration but as subtle subversion — visual puns, sideways gestures and moments of intentional awkwardness that puncture the solemnity often associated with contemporary art. Jalil approaches visual systems with affection but also with irreverence, reminding viewers that such systems, however authoritative, are human-made and always open to reinterpretation.

Ultimately, this exhibition is deeply concerned with learning and unlearning. The works often feel like pages from an unruly workbook, where lessons slip beyond boundaries and connections form unexpectedly. The viewer is encouraged to participate, to complete the thought and to reconsider what qualifies as ‘artistic’, ‘refined’ or ‘meaningful’.

Jalil repositions the line as gesture, as boundary, as idea and as a tool of inquiry and imagination. This is a timely, thoughtful exhibition from one of Pakistan’s most inquisitive artist-educators.

Lines and Language was on display at Canvas Gallery, Karachi from November 25-December 4, 2025.

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, December 28th, 2025.

Cover photo: Canvas Gallery.