“I will polish shoes, but I won’t do engineering. I will paint.” -Ismail Gulgee 1 Pakistani artist Ismail Gulgee’s art practice has often been read biographically or categorized as decorative, leaving it overly romanticized and overlooked. The new publication Gulgee…
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…
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…
When the diverse quadrants of human experience convene in one show, it is an absorbing encounter that stays with the viewer and leads us to question reflexive paradigms of memory and social immersion. Ai Wei Wei says “Art has to…
Colombo rests upon a living, aqueous tapestry of thirty-six wetland patches that intertwine with some 50 km of meandering canal.5 The city is neither entirely water nor land, remaining in a perpetual state of flux further shaped by legacies of…
The book The Living Heritage of Hazara: An Ode to the Makers and Memory Keepers by Amina Ali is a vibrant celebration of the culture, cuisine, and musical traditions of the Hazara community. The Hazara are an ethnic group native…
Meher Afroz’s multilayered art connects strands of thought with rich and restrained color. It holds secrets that concern the nature of existence and is impregnated with esoteric meaning. As one of Pakistan’s most iconic contemporary artists, Meher’s decades-long output richly…
Karachi --- On occasion of Chawkandi Art Gallery’s 40th anniversary, Dialogues Across Time invited seventeen practicing artists to come vis-à-vis with experienced veterans, who once shaped the gallery’s advancement in its early years. Chawkandi’s founder Zohra Hussain recalls these initial…
The British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that “the logical picture of a fact is a Gedanke”.15 Simply put, Wittgenstein considered the act of thinking as a kind of a pictorial operation. Thoughts, sentences, and images represent reality by arranging…
We are twenty-five years into the new century, and despite all the curbs on freedom of expression Contemporary Art has successfully navigated the deeply fraught terrain and become an integral part of the country’s cultural consciousness. Curatorial practice has supported…