Once a precocious offspring of a venerable parent, the Conte-mporary Miniature distanced from the original classic model is now practised and acknowledged as an independent genre. At its inception, the National College of Arts (NCA) miniature programme comprised strict traditional training based on copying Persian, Mughal, Rajput and Pahari styles. In the 1980s artist/educator, Zahoor ul Akhlaq, partly through his own practice, but also by elevating the miniature department to the same status as Western painting, printmaking and sculpture activated the latent potential of miniature painting as a space for creating contemporary art.

By the mid-1990s, students had begun fracturing the traditional techniques, vocabulary and narrative into lively subversive art. This revolution was initially kick started by the very spirited and enormously talented Shazia Sikander.

“I would say that I emerged as an artist at the very beginning of the movement. As soon as I graduated I was asked to teach alongside [Bashir] Ahmed, the first time his student had ever taught with him. This attracted a new, larger body of students, who otherwise would have been less likely to major in miniature painting. And many of them are now exhibiting all over the world,” divulges Sikander in her interview with Asian art scholar Dr Vishakha N. Desai.

Salwat Ali explains the vibrant visual language of miniature painting and its continued significance in the contemporary art scene

Today, comprising a wealth of extraordinary talent, considerable international acclaim and a rising market index the Contemporary Miniature stands tall as an indigenous genre instep with current global art. Frontrunners like Shahzia Sikander, Imran Qureshi, Aisha Khalid, Nusra Latif, Tazeen Qayum, etc, and subsequent followers such as Muhammad Zeeshan, Khadim Ali, Usman Saeed, Waseem Ahmed, etc, pushed the miniature far beyond the traditional boundaries of the page.

Reinventing the dislocation (1989-1987), Shazia Sikander

Flourishing as a multi-layered mix of social and political issues, gender conflicts, identity politics and diaspora concerns, the miniature marches to several tunes. It is no longer just a technique or a collection of tropes and media, but a sensibility that is shared by non-miniaturists as well — for example, Hamra Abbas has interrogated the forms and frameworks of miniature through sculpture, installations, ceramics, lenticular prints, videos and even drawings — and in Rashid Rana’s composite photographs each single photograph is like a single pardakht application of paint in miniature painting.

Enjoying several dimensions, the miniature continues to grow and expand; there’s much wealth and diversity inherent in the miniature. Deconstructed, reinvented and cross pollinated with other disciplines the genre exists in an assortment of forms.

When queried if this multiplicity is the real face of the Contemporary Miniature Tazeen Qayum, an established miniature artist now practising in Canada who has a strong grasp on the genre’s traditional techniques yet has her feet firmly planted in the contemporary art world, countered, “When does a work of art cross the lines from being a miniature painting to a miniature-inspired painting to an attempted miniature painting?

“I think the contemporary definition of the medium is at its evolutionary peak right now, a time when there are debates, confusions, no distinct definition, rejection as well as endorsement of all sorts. At the same time we see a variety of experimentation within, ranging from fantastic critical expressions, to extremely skill-based works, to works that fail at both.”

Regarding the importance and option of retaining links with the purist form or allowing the contemporary idiom to be dominant she was of the opinion that “the classical training of the discipline and a continuous comparative study of this art form has provided a sense of grounding, not only in the laborious skill of art making but also in the history of the region as well as the history of this art form. All this cannot be unlearned.”

Elaborating her point of view she further remarked “I would foremost call myself a contemporary visual artist and although the medium does not dictate what my art is, it most definitely is a tool, a visual language that I can most comfortably communicate in. For me it is always the narrative that is critical, but there are distinct and visible influences of my learning in how I approach the narrative and exercise the discipline throughout my art-making process.

“Each time I gravitate towards painstaking details, organised discipline and laborious process — be in the repetitive strokes of the qalam or piercing hundreds of tiny pins on a surface or writing a single phrase for hours in a live performance or even organising a dinner party at home — I feel that the historic ‘purist form’ provides such an open-ended vocabulary and a significant body of reference that artists have been flying with it and I foresee a lot more interpretations to come.”

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 13th, 2014