As a platform committed to critical cultural production from and about the Global South, The Karachi Collective creates space for connecting struggles across geographies through art, testimony, and collective memory. Presented alongside the conversations taking place, on social media and…
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 lake is already awake when the artists arrive. Houseboats rock gently, fastened more by habit than rope. Nets dry in uneven arcs along their wooden spines. Children lean over the water’s edge, watching reflections rupture and reform. For five…
The cultural and economic value of textile craft micro-enterprises is often visible in present-day urban centres, projects led by non-profits, and consumerist practices in Pakistan. Reading through definitions of textile craft19, one comes across descriptions referring to activities engaged with…
Last year, I visited ‘The Haveli Museum’ in Karachi, where the exhibition The Coat of Many Colours displayed textile-based crafts from Sindh. These objects included bujhki31, coverlets, and posh32, among several others. Observing these items stirred a quiet nostalgia for…
To be nostalgic is to exist between fragments of a memory and its imagined idealization. Curated by Noor Ahmed, the exhibition fanaa is the eclipse at Sanat Initiative presents works by the artist Zahra Mansoor where it navigates the domestic…
This essay is based on an interview between the author and Karachi-born, Brooklyn-based artist Hiba Schahbaz. Hiba Schahbaz’s paintings look autobiographical; self-portraiture is a recurring theme representing her unknown and unresolved cognitive musings. However, the contexts shift visually between the…
In her solo show titled “Lines and Language” at Karachi’s Canvas Gallery, the artist Rabeya Jalil drills into gesture and asks: how do we move, strike, puncture, and scrape? In Jalil’s paintings we may see amorphous blobs, strokes, and patches…
When looking at the world in black and white takes a literal turn, and you soak your senses in the world of contradictions you find yourself amongst the works of Khalil Chishti and Adeel-uz Zafar. Works that defy gravity, intrigue…
When looking at the world in black and white takes a literal turn, and you soak your senses in the world of contradictions you find yourself amongst the works of Khalil Chishti and Adeel-uz Zafar. Works that defy gravity, intrigue…
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