Birds of different hues, shapes and sizes – big, small, flightless – join a caravan to the sky in search of their mythological counterpart, the simurgh, in Ali Kazim’s five-panelled watercolour on paper, Conference of the Birds, set to a vocal rendition of the eponymous Persian poem by 12th century Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar. Unsuspectingly nestled behind a showcase of Qatari history and society at the National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ) in Doha, this is the first work that most visitors to MANZAR: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today might encounter. A landmark exhibition organised by Qatar’s future Art Mill Museum, earmarked for showcases of international modern and contemporary art, MANZAR is sprawled across indoor and outdoor spaces at NMOQ, which is designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel, its facade of interlocking discs paying homage to the desert rose crystal found in Qatar’s landscape. The Art Mill Museum is one of three upcoming museums – the others include the Lusail Museum, which will house a significant collection of Orientalist paintings and photography and the Qatar Auto Museum – all developed in line with a national vision plan that addresses the country’s social, economic and political aspirations. 

MANZAR is curated by Caroline Hancock, Art Mill Museum senior curator of modern and contemporary art, Aurélien Lemonier, Art Mill Museum curator of architecture, design and gardens and Zarmeene Shah, independent curator, writer and director of graduate studies at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS) in Karachi with Art Mill Museum senior exhibition project manager Aebhric Coleman. It is on view till January 31, 2025. Hancock and Shah spoke with STIR, leading a video walkthrough of the exhibition and offering a glimpse of their curatorial process.

The exhibition starts a few years before the end of colonial rule in the subcontinent, leading to Pakistan becoming an independent nation in 1947. Works from Zainul Abedin’s Bengal Famine series document the 1943 famine, a product of wartime food supply crises, inflation and climate devastation, which shaped activist theatre and literature in the waning years of the British empire. Indian-born American artist Zarina, whose family left Aligarh in India to move to Karachi in the 1950s, prints floor plans from her lost childhood home over a letter from her sister in My House 1937 - 1958 (1994). Her Dividing Line (2001), mimics the pedestrian violence of the Radcliffe Line, the border between the new nation-states of India and Pakistan, devised by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe. Feminist writer and publisher Urvashi Butalia speaks of the “long shadow” of partition, casting it as an event that continues to shape the social and political fabric of postcolonial India and Pakistan. Their mutually tense relationship is evinced in jingoistic portrayals across popular cinema and at touristy crossings like the Wagah Border in Punjab, where both nation states orchestrate a performative lowering of their national flags at sunset each evening, to an enthusiastic audience of thousands. Bani Abidi’s The News (2006) sees her simultaneously playing an Indian and Pakistani newsreader, televised on a clunky black monitor, relaying the same news to audiences on either side of the border, but with each rendition appealing to the nationalistic sentiments of Indian and Pakistani listeners.

Many of the artists in MANZAR are current or former faculty at arts colleges in Pakistan – the National College of Arts (NCA) and Beaconhouse National University, both in Lahore, and IVS in Karachi among them. In the relative absence of other state funding structures or spaces for practice, arts colleges have nurtured new directions in visual practice and offered supportive environments to students and teachers. Shah, one of the three curators of the show, teaches at IVS, while MANZAR artist Zahoor ul Akhlaq taught at NCA for nearly three decades. His students include Imran Qureshi, Shahzia Sikander and Rashid Rana, all featured in MANZAR.

Rana’s Red Carpet (2007) looks just like an elaborately patterned Persian carpet; go closer and you see thousands of tiny images of scenes from slaughterhouses, a mashup of banal reality, pieced together to form a thing of beauty. Meanwhile, in The Scroll II (1991), Sikander marries Gandharan birch bark scrolls and 20th century imagery in the emerging neo-miniaturist idiom that she pioneered in Pakistan – pierced by the bark, a woman lies prostrate in one of the vignettes. Farida Batool, head of the cultural studies department at NCA, shows Nai Reesan Shehr Lahore Diyan (There is no match for the city of Lahore), where her choice of producing a lenticular print illustrates the scene’s complexity – as a riot unfolds in a Lahore street, a young girl hops with a skipping rope, her oblivious delight commensurate to the intensity of violence in the frame.

Shared intimacies recur in the works of Anwar Saeed, also a former NCA teacher, and Pakistani-American figurative painter Salman Toor, who exploded onto the global scene with his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 2020. In Saeed’s View Larger Than Life Man Throwing His Burdens Away (2005), two bare-torsoed men stare out at a naked figure, his middle carefully shielded by a printed image of an ancient sculpture. Meanwhile, in Toor’s Empty Plot (2017), a man is bent over, his shirt riding up as he skins an animal, while a sharply dressed man takes in his awkward stance.

Sustained through military regimes and economic instability, arts practice in Pakistan is closely tied to pedagogic and activist frameworks, with homegrown efforts to document an emerging landscape. While Rasheed Araeen makes an appearance in the exhibition through his vibrant geometric sculpture, 4rS (1970-2016) and photos from his performance Burning Ties (1976-1979), he is also credited for his archival and publication practice, through magazines like Third Text Asia, his 1989 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain , and his anti-establishment advocacy, through works like Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto (1975-79). Another display is dedicated to posters and photographs from the Women’s Action Forum and ‘80s covers of The Herald magazine, documenting Zia ul Haq’s decade-long dictatorship – an entire wall is dedicated to Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem Hum Dekhenge (We shall bear witness) (it would later be resurrected as a protest anthem during protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India in 2019-20), written as a challenge to his regime.

A section of MANZAR is dedicated to Karachi Pop, a late ‘90s and early 2000s phenomenon; its aesthetic language drew from public space, vernacular craft practices and urban kitsch. The Urdu Film Series by Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi frames expressive scenes from TV and cinema within an old-fashioned oval TV screen – each with a one word descriptor – the nine C-prints on display include Lust, Delirium and Wonder. Adeela Suleman comments on gender and society through her helmets made of everyday objects, including elaborately painted stacks of serving bowls.

The exhibition segues between art and architecture, also through the lineage of its designer, architect Raza Ali Dada, whose father Nayyar Ali Dada designed Lahore’s Alhamra Arts Centre. Post independence, both Pakistan and India needed to expand major cities to accommodate refugees from across the border, setting up urban development authorities in cities like Karachi and Delhi. When Ayub Khan came to power following a military coup in 1959, he declared Dhaka (then Dacca) in erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) a second capital to appease its citizens, initiating the construction of a new parliament building, designed by American architect Louis Kahn. Urban planning also responded to broader postcolonial aspirations – with Pakistan seeking to project a stable and modern image to the world. Architectural drawings from Karachi illustrate the city’s rapid growth – as Pakistan built a new capital city in Islamabad, Karachi reinvented itself as the country’s economic capital. Major infrastructural projects followed; an image of the Tarbela Dam monument from the Zahoor ul Akhlaq archive remembers the 400 workers who died during the protracted construction of the earth-filled dam in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province between the ‘60s and ‘70s. Yasmeen Lari’s flood-resistant bamboo shelters fill one section of the museum’s courtyard, a grim reminder of the persistent floods Pakistan has seen every monsoon, and its growing population of climate migrants.

Qatar is in the process of reinventing itself with large-scale infrastructural development and a rapidly growing culture machinery. The national museum’s permanent collection, also starring a giant whale shark suspended in mid-air, illustrates Qatar’s history from prehistory and ancient times, all the way to its rapid development after the discovery of oil and gas reserves. There is public art scattered around the country; one afternoon, our group of journalists accompanied by Qatar Museums staff made the 75-minute drive to Zekreet on Qatar’s west coast. Here, Richard Serra’s installation East-West/West-East forms a perfect line from desert to sea, four rectangular steel plates across the length of a kilometre, the spaces between them offering a frame for the setting sun. Invoking his 2013 series Broken Men, Rashid Johnson’s Village of the Sun, in a park by Doha International Airport,is made up of four mosaic-covered walls – the colourful figures on them are discernible, but only barely so. At Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, a three-part exhibition, Seeing Is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme, begins to hint at the complex legacy of the French painter and sculptor, attempting to propose counterpoints in its final section, where artists from the Global South address colonialism and foreign powers in their home contexts, like Inci Eviner’s 2009 work Harem, which repopulates a 19th century engraving by French painter and architect Antoine Ignace Melling with female figures captured in frenetic states of activity. The work has since been removed from the exhibition at the request of the Ministry of Culture, ARTnews reported earlier this week. Works by young local artists – many are recent graduates of the international universities springing up in its Education City – were on view at Fire Station, a contemporary art space. Here, Somaia Dorzadeh’s The Individual in the Collective stood out for her portrayal of immigrant life and its simmering uncertainties – through a video and installation-based recreation of her time in the now-demolished Al Baluche camp in Qatar, a temporary settlement for Afghan migrants. In her video, sleek cars line a dilapidated street – a reminder of the societal roles many Global South migrants occupy as members of the service industry.

As the first major exhibition by the Art Mill Museum, if MANZAR cites the shared cultural history of Qatar and Pakistan – both former colonial nations, it also speaks to contemporary patterns of migration, and the import of the exhibition in this context, with Pakistanis making up 5 per cent of Qatar’s total population. The Urdu word manzar, which suggests a scene, view or landscape, lends the exhibition its curatorial framing as one perspective (among many) of modern culture and society in Pakistan. Language – alongside stylistic affinities, postcolonial architecture, popular culture and the violence of Partition – all inform the shared history of the subcontinent which underpins MANZAR – a history that is largely inaccessible at this scale and scope across the border in India. Along the lines of India-Pakistan cricket matches, which must often be played in a third country – a recent (and contentious) proposal suggests shifting some Champions Trophy 2025 matches from Pakistan to the UAE – it was easier for me to travel to Doha to see MANZAR than it would ever be to make the much shorter journey into Pakistan, which is a few hours away by road.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR.