Equally compelling were the survey plans, municipal records and architectural blueprints displayed throughout the exhibition. Although originally produced for practical purposes – planning roads, recording property boundaries, designing buildings or documenting civic infrastructure – they possess a graphic beauty that often goes unnoticed. Their measured lines, annotations and carefully balanced compositions reveal an understated elegance born of precision rather than ornamentation. For an architect, such drawings are more than technical documents; they represent moments in the evolution of the city itself, preserving ideas before they assumed physical form.

I (Mukhtar) found myself lingering before several of these drawings, recognising in them the language of architectural practice. A blueprint is often regarded simply as an intermediary stage in the construction of a building, yet once the structure has been altered, demolished or lost, the drawing acquires a different significance. It becomes historical testimony. Seen in the context of the exhibition, these plans invited viewers to consider not merely individual buildings but the broader processes through which Karachi has been imagined, planned and continually reshaped.

Taken together, the maps, survey drawings, municipal plans and blueprints demonstrated that archives preserve more than isolated objects. They preserve relationships: between land and sea, settlement and infrastructure, architecture and memory, people and place. Read collectively, they reveal the city as an ever-changing organism whose history can be traced through successive layers of documentation.

The two companion exhibitions find a more permanent home in the substantial publication Karachi Cartographies: Seeing the City through Art and Archives. Produced by the Furqaan Ahmed Collection in a limited edition of only two hundred copies, the elegantly designed volume is far more than a conventional exhibition catalogue. It combines historical scholarship, archival material and contemporary artistic practice into a richly illustrated publication that continues the dialogue initiated in the galleries. Alongside a foreword by Dr Furqaan Ahmed, it includes two substantial essays by Zarmeeneh Shah and Marvi Mazhar, which is the intellectual heart of the publication, as well as reproductions of works by Seema Nusrat, Arif Mahmood, Jovita Alvares, Minahil Khurram, Asma Mundrawala, Shakil Adil, Saad Choudhry, Roohi Ahmed, Naveed Siddiqui, Yaminay Chaudhri and several other artists.

The publication opens with a perceptive observation by Roohi Ahmed: “To its inhabitants, Karachi often appears to be a paradox. The fabric of the city is a complex weave of overlapping spheres that engulf us from all sides, yet there is so much beneath the surface that we neither see nor comprehend.”

It is an apt introduction to a project that seeks to uncover the many visible and invisible layers that have shaped Karachi across centuries.

In his introduction, Dr Furqaan Ahmed poses three deceptively simple questions. What tools can one use to understand a city? Especially one as complicated and contested as Karachi? And what intersections exist between contemporary art and archival material in helping us understand that city? These questions resonate throughout both the exhibition and the publication, encouraging readers to consider archives and artworks not as separate disciplines but as complementary ways of seeing.

In Dreams, Desires and Fears: Karachi as Artistic Imagination and Representation, Zarmeeneh Shah traces the city’s long and layered history through the evolution of its very name. She notes its appearance as Kharachi in Pahlavi texts dating to around 230 BCE, its emergence as Kalachi in the twelfth-century Sindhi legend of Moriro Mirbahar, its description as Kalazi by the fifteenth-century Arab navigator Ibn Majid, and its eventual transformation into Kolachi during the Talpur period. Like its many names, Karachi itself has continually evolved. At the time of Partition in 1947, it was home to fewer than half a million people drawn from diverse religious and ethnic communities. As Pakistan’s first capital, it subsequently welcomed successive waves of migrants from across the subcontinent and later from every region of the country, each community leaving its imprint on the city’s architecture, languages, commerce and cultural life. Shah’s essay reminds us that Karachi’s identity has never been fixed; it has always been shaped by movement, encounter and reinvention.

If Shah explores Karachi’s historical imagination, architect and conservationist Marvi Mazhar examines its physical memory in her essay, Karachi as Archive: Maps, Memory, and the Built Environment. She encourages readers to look beyond maps as navigational tools and instead recognise them as instruments of urban knowledge. Through municipal archives, survey records and planning documents, she demonstrates how cities record their own evolution, revealing changing patterns of governance, infrastructure and civic planning. Particularly fascinating is her discussion of the renaming of Karachi’s streets after Partition, illustrating how political transitions were inscribed onto the urban landscape itself. A street name is never merely a label; it reflects changing identities, shifting priorities and the continual rewriting of civic memory. Her essay also underscores the importance of preserving architectural drawings, municipal plans and survey records, for these documents chart not only the growth of individual neighbourhoods but the evolution of Karachi as a whole.

Read together, the essays demonstrate that understanding Karachi requires more than a chronological account of historical events. It demands an engagement with both its cultural memory and its physical fabric. History survives not only in monuments and written narratives but also in maps, blueprints, municipal records, street names and the built environment itself.

Artists Reading the City

If the archival collection and the accompanying essays provide the historical and architectural framework of Karachi Cartographies, the participating artists offer something equally valuable: personal interpretations of the city. Rather than illustrating history, they respond to it, transforming maps, memories and archival traces into works that explore belonging, migration, violence, landscape and identity. Collectively, they demonstrate that while archives preserve evidence, art gives that evidence emotional resonance.

Roohi Ahmed, for example, literally stitches maps with needle and thread onto fabric, replacing the precision of the surveyor with the intimacy of the hand. Her embroidered interventions remind us that places are never experienced solely through coordinates or boundaries. They are shaped by memory, attachment, displacement and belonging. A map becomes a neighbourhood remembered, a home left behind, a route retraced countless times or a boundary crossed in search of a new beginning. Geography is transformed into autobiography.

Naveed Siddiqui approaches mapping from an altogether different direction. His assemblages, constructed from corrugated cardboard and found materials, suggest the improvised and layered nature of urban life itself. Fragmented and reconstructed, his surfaces resemble cities continually built, dismantled and rebuilt. His work reminds us that cities are assembled not only from bricks and roads but from accumulated experiences, each layer concealing another beneath it.

Together these artists challenge conventional understandings of cartography. They invite us to consider maps not as finished documents but as living records, continually rewritten by those who inhabit the spaces they depict.

Questions of migration, memory and belonging find equally compelling expression in the works of Jovita Alvares and Veera Rustomjee. Although working independently and from different personal histories, both artists examine how individual family narratives illuminate Karachi’s wider multicultural identity.

Drawing upon family photographs and vernacular imagery, Jovita Alvares reconstructs the journey of her Goan ancestors to Karachi. The photographs function simultaneously as historical documents and emotional touchstones, recording lives lived across shifting geographies. Rather than presenting migration simply as movement from one place to another, she explores its quieter consequences: the preservation of memory, the adaptation to unfamiliar surroundings and the gradual formation of new identities.

Veera Rustomjee’s work is similarly rooted in memory, though her approach is more fragmentary and introspective. Drawing upon family narratives and her Persian heritage, she assembles seemingly modest recollections that gradually acquire wider significance. Her works evoke the fragile nature of remembrance itself, suggesting that memory is never complete but composed of fleeting images, inherited stories and half-forgotten conversations. In doing so, she reminds us that Karachi’s history cannot be understood solely through official records; it also survives in domestic rituals, family albums and private recollections passed from one generation to the next.

Together, Alvares and Rustomjee reaffirm one of the exhibition’s central themes: Karachi has long been a city of migration, where successive communities have contributed to its cultural richness while negotiating the inevitable tensions between continuity and change. Their works demonstrate that family histories are never entirely private; collectively, they form part of the larger story of the city.

Other artists confront more unsettling aspects of Karachi’s past. Among the most thought-provoking is Seema Nusrat, whose practice transforms familiar objects into unsettling reflections on violence, absence and collective memory. Her use of found materials and textiles exemplifies the exhibition’s broader dialogue between everyday artefacts and historical meaning.

One of her most striking works begins with an ordinary jute sack – a commonplace object associated with commerce and daily life. Through subtle yet powerful intervention, however, it assumes darker associations, evoking the anonymous gunny bags that became grim symbols during Karachi’s years of political violence. Draped with a delicate vintage tapestry, the work juxtaposes beauty and brutality, forcing viewers to confront the uneasy coexistence of tenderness and trauma within the city’s collective memory. Elsewhere, road signs are transformed into architectural facades, blurring distinctions between public infrastructure and domestic space while suggesting how ordinary urban forms can become repositories of deeply personal histories.

Where Nusrat explores the psychological landscape of the city, Fazal Rizvi turns to its natural rhythms. His restrained, minimalist compositions employ repeated linear markings reminiscent of musical notation or scientific recording. Inspired by the ebb and flow of the sea, the works evoke cycles of movement, stillness and renewal. Their quiet economy stands in marked contrast to Karachi’s visual intensity, reminding viewers that beyond the city’s noise and congestion lies another landscape governed by tides, horizons and the passage of time. In their measured restraint, Rizvi’s works offer moments of contemplation within an exhibition largely concerned with movement, transformation and memory.

Naiza Khan’s contribution draws upon her long engagement with Manora, the island that has occupied her artistic practice for many years. Using maps, historical documents and sustained field research as points of departure, she investigates Manora as a microcosm of Karachi itself – a place where military history, colonial legacies, local communities and environmental change intersect. Rather than treating archival material as illustration, she reinterprets it through contemporary artistic practice, demonstrating how documents of the past can generate new ways of thinking about landscape, identity and belonging.

The participating artists do not simply depict Karachi. They read it. They examine its physical form, its social fabric, its migrations, its memories and its absences. Their works converse with maps, archival records and historical documents, enriching rather than illustrating them. In doing so, they reinforce the exhibition’s central proposition: that understanding a city requires both documentation and imagination. One records what happened; the other helps us understand what those events continue to mean.

One of the exhibition’s most engaging educational initiatives takes a very different form. Sophia Balagamwala’s children’s activity guide deserves particular mention, not as an afterthought but as an integral part of the project’s wider ambition. Instead of simplifying the exhibition for younger audiences, the guide encourages children to become active participants in observing, drawing and interpreting the city around them. Through playful exercises rooted in careful looking, mapping and mark-making, it invites the next generation to cultivate curiosity about Karachi’s history, architecture and public spaces. In doing so, it reminds us that learning to read a city begins not in adulthood but in childhood, with the simple act of paying attention.

Keeping the City’s Memory Alive

One of the exhibition’s quieter achievements is that it encourages visitors to think beyond the galleries themselves. It raises a question that has long occupied historians, architects and conservationists alike: why does a city as historically rich and culturally diverse as Karachi still not have a museum dedicated to its own story?

Such an institution need not be conceived merely as a repository of artefacts. It could become a living centre for understanding Karachi’s evolution, bringing together maps, navigational charts, municipal records, architectural drawings, blueprints, photographs, films, oral histories, books and everyday objects that illuminate the city’s many transformations. One can even imagine a large three-dimensional model charting Karachi’s remarkable physical growth from the fishing settlement of Kolachi to the sprawling metropolis of today. Such a museum would allow residents to understand not only where the city has come from but also how successive generations have shaped its identity.

Equally regrettable is the absence of a public museum in Karachi with a permanent collection devoted to Pakistani art. Although the country possesses outstanding artists, much of their work remains dispersed among private collections, galleries and institutions. Public museums serve not only as custodians of artistic heritage but also as spaces where communities encounter their shared cultural history. The two aspirations are, in many ways, complementary. A city museum and a museum of Pakistani art would together preserve both Karachi’s material history and its creative imagination.

Until such institutions become a reality, private collectors continue to perform an invaluable public service. Collections such as that assembled by Dr Furqaan Ahmed preserve objects that might otherwise disappear into obscurity or be lost altogether. More importantly, they demonstrate that collecting is not simply an act of acquisition but one of stewardship. Maps, photographs, municipal records, architectural plans, signboards and everyday artefacts acquire renewed significance when carefully researched, conserved and shared with a wider audience.

Karachi Cartographies also reminds us that archives themselves are dynamic rather than static. They are continually reinterpreted by historians, architects, artists and researchers, each bringing fresh questions to familiar material. The exhibition’s greatest achievement lies in fostering this dialogue. Rather than presenting archival records as relics of a completed past or artworks as isolated aesthetic objects, it encouraged visitors to move freely between evidence and interpretation, fact and imagination. The maps, blueprints, municipal documents and artworks enriched one another, revealing that the history of a city is never contained within a single discipline or medium.

Every generation inherits a city. It also inherits responsibility for its memory. Buildings may disappear, neighbourhoods may change and communities may move elsewhere, yet maps, archives, artworks and everyday artefacts continue to bear witness to lives once lived. Preserving them is not an exercise in nostalgia; it is an investment in understanding who we have been and, perhaps, who we might yet become.

Karachi has always been a city of many narratives. Some are written in stone, others in paper; some survive in family albums, others in municipal records or fading blueprints. Many are preserved by artists who transform memory into image, and by collectors who recognise the value of safeguarding fragments that others might overlook. Together, these diverse forms of remembering reveal a city that has never ceased evolving, yet has never entirely lost sight of its past.

Maps record where a city has been.

Archives preserve what it has witnessed.

Art imagines what those records cannot always say, giving emotional resonance to facts and forgotten histories alike.

Together, they reveal the stories a city keeps.

’Karachi Cartographies: Seeing the City Through Art and Archives’ opened on June 2, 2026. Curated by Dr. Furqaan Ahmed, this historic multi-venue exhibition concluded its run at Canvas Gallery and Koel Gallery on June 20, 2026. The landmark project showcased Karachi’s hidden ecologies through 53 contemporary artworks and 95 rare archival pieces.

Title Image: Ruqayah Jamil. Untitled Installation, 2025, Found objects, Gizri stone construction aggregate; digital print and plexiglass, Dimensions variable

All images are courtesy Canvas Gallery and Dr. Furqaan Ahmed;  image 06 by Rumana Husain