Dawn Images

Having followed Shanzay Subzwari’s trajectory since her striking large-scale portraits of Pakistan’s cricket stars at The Second Floor (T2F) in 2013, when she was still a student at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS), one has witnessed a compelling evolution in both form and thought. What began as an engagement with popular culture and recognisable iconography has gradually deepened into a far more introspective and metaphysical practice.

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