Dawn Images

As I enter the gallery, I am confronted by two formidable walls of collaged landscapes that reconfigure Hunza’s mountains, valleys and glaciers. The colours have been digitally altered, shifting the terrain into heightened, almost otherworldly registers, while flecks of gold leaf catch the light, lending the works a fragile, luminous intensity.

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