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 What happens when six artists, all schooled in the same artistic tradition and all located around the world, collaborate together on a dynamic creative experiment in which each artist initiates two new paintings and passes them on to another artist, until all of them have contributed to twelve paintings?
See for yourself at the Asian Art Museum’s first exhibition focusing on contemporary South Asian art.
Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration is an exhibition showcasing a series of twelve miniature paintings created through the mutual effort of six young and acclaimed contemporary Pakistani artists: Aisha Khalid, Hasnat Mehmood, Imran Qureshi, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Talha Rathore, and Saira Wasim. They all are alumni of the miniature department at the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore.
In addition to these twelve miniature paintings, there will be five additional paintings by each of the six artists that illustrate his or her distinctive hand. The solo works present six unique pictorial languages which express different aspects of their shared political perspective—a point of view grounded in Pakistan’s history of colonization, Partition, and global marginalization.
The catalyst for the Karkhana project, which brought all six artists together around a single visual statement, was the American military action in the wake of September 11, 2001. Their efforts represent “postcards” in serial format which respond to imperial powers of the past and present.
Karkhana is an Urdu term for the workshops where traditional court paintings were produced, largely through cooperation and collaboration among various artists who each had particular skills and styles.
The young artists whose communal works appear in this exhibition have created their own 21st-century karkhana. They have pushed the boundaries of the traditional miniature painting, assimilating new imagery and materials into their work while engaging in explicit social and political criticism.
The results of their collaboration reveal improvisation, acts of creative destruction, semiotic play, and dynamic adaptation.
Please click here for the press release.
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