I frequently receive requests from art galleries, prospective buyers, and sellers to authenticate and appraise paintings by South Asian masters including F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain, Syed Sadequain Naqvi, Zainul Abedin, S.M. Sultan, Ahmed Parvez, Bashir Mirza and Ismail Gulgee. Most…
He was born in Poona and his mentor in Rawalpindi. Fifteen years apart in age they grew up in different cities but eventually met in Karachi in the early 1970s. This is how the entanglement of the two artists, Ahmed…
Stand anywhere in Karachi today and you will find roundabouts, fountains, and the occasional tarnishing monument. What you will not find are the bronze and marble statues that once stood in the city's public squares. Their absence asks: what does…
In the summer of 2025, I wandered beneath the large white marquee of the Bradford Literature Festival in the UK, browsing new books, exploring exhibitions, and attending a few talks and lecture performances.20 The most captivating session was “The Poetry…
The women in Farazeh Syed’s paintings come to us from colonially produced and disseminated photographs that never intended to tell the subjects’ real stories. Syed’s exploration of this history is presented in her solo exhibition, All the Women in Me.…
مشتاق گزدر کا کہنا ہے کہ اپنے تجربات کی روشنی میں اداکاری پر ریڈیو ،ٹیلی ویژن، فلم اور اسٹیج کے حوالے سے۔ اور ان میڈیا پر اداکاری میں جو فرق ہے اس پر ایک مضمون لکھ دوں۔ مضمون تین چار…
The more you immerse yourself in Sadequain’s art the more you become aware of the vast vision and intellectual depth that unfolds in his murals, paintings, drawings and illustrations. The ambition of his scale and inventive breadth comes together to…
The intrepid panel of researchers, photographers, writers, and activists who have compiled the information and gone on to publish the book Giving Voice to Silence redeem humanity by bearing witness to the multitudinous and harrowing tales of a subset of…
Cities keep stories They are embedded in weathered buildings and fading signboards, in brittle documents, forgotten photographs and carefully folded maps whose creases have survived generations of use. Some are preserved in libraries and museums; others remain hidden in private…
I walked into Intimate Resistance at The VASL Gallery on the 25th of November 2025 with a kind of cautious curiosity. Photography exhibitions in Pakistan are rare to begin with, and when they do happen, they often fall into familiar…