November 1, 2024–January 31, 2025
Qatar Museums presents the first exhibition to chronicle modern and contemporary visual arts and architecture from Pakistan.
Qatar Museums will open a first-of-its-kind exhibition exploring arts and architecture from Pakistan since the 1940s. MANZAR: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today (November 1, 2024–January 31, 2025) bringing together more than 200 artworks—paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, tapestries and miniatures, plus commissioned works by artists and architects currently living and working in Pakistan and its diasporas—to present various views of the country’s artistic and architectural movements.
Organised by the future Art Mill Museum and presented in collaboration with the National Museum of Qatar, MANZAR presents the enormously diverse output of the artists, photographers, architects and others who have defined the array of narratives, histories, and contemporary perspectives of Pakistan’s cultures over the past eighty years.
Through twelve themed galleries the exhibition presents a perspective on arts from Pakistan through unprecedented loans from public institutions such as the Alhamra Art Museum in Lahore and Pakistan National Council of the Arts in Islamabad; loans from private collections across Pakistan and in Dubai, London and New York; and works from Qatar Museums collections.
MANZAR is an Urdu and Arabic word meaning scene, view, landscape, or perspective. The exhibition begins with artists such as Abdur Rahman Chughtai and Zainul Abedin, who worked during the British Raj, and continued their practices in what became West and East Pakistan. The Partition of 1947 was—and still is—a major subject for artists such as Anna Molka Ahmed, Zarina and Bani Abidi. Organised loosely chronologically, the exhibition moves into aesthetic experiments by artists including Shakir Ali, Zubeida Agha, Murtaja Baseer and Sadequain, who developed highly personal modes of expression in urban centres including Karachi, Lahore, Dhaka and the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad.
Special attention is given to architects who transformed the country’s landscape and articulated the ambitions of its institutions through major building projects. The first phase of development involved the expertise of many modern Western architects, such as the French Michel Ecochard, who built the first university in Karachi; Konstantínos Doxiádis from Greece, who was in charge of planning the future capital Islamabad; and architects from US who contributed to the establishment of the nation-state’s institutions, such as Louis Kahn, Richard Neutra and Edward Durell Stone. MANZAR then focuses on Pakistan’s role in the debate on regionalism in architecture, with the backdrop of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, held for the first time in Lahore in 1980. The works of major architects such as Nayyar Ali Dada and Kamil Khan Mumtaz from Lahore and Yasmeen Lari, Habib Fida Ali and Arif Hasan from Karachi will be presented in the context of this intellectual explosion.
Among the highlights by visual artists are works by Zahoor ul Akhlaq, Imran Mir and Rasheed Araeen, whose multidisciplinary approaches, involvement in educational initiatives, and theoretical writings challenged Western art history and traditions at home and internationally. Influential figures of different generations, such as Salima Hashmi, Quddus Mirza, Lala Rukh, Durriya Kazi, are represented. Alongside them are Rashid Rana, Imran Qureshi, Risham Syed and Hamra Abbas, who are known as key educators at the National College of Art and Beaconhouse National University in Lahore; and at Karachi University and Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi.
The exhibition 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 in Karachi, with Art Mill Museum Senior Exhibition Project Manager Aebhric Coleman. Collaborators include Karachi-based researcher Noor Butt; Deena Hammam, Associate Curator for Learning and Audience Engagement, Art Mill Museum; and Farah Al Sidiky, Curatorial Researcher, Art Mill Museum. The exhibition is designed by architect Raza Ali Dada.
