Traditionally curators specialised in selection and placement of art and artefacts in museums. Today their role is far more expansive. Besides staging exhibitions, interpreting the art and writing the accompanying catalogues, being skilled in business, marketing, public relations and fundraising is also a requisite. Now the curatorial role is focused on viewer collaboration and engagement with art, both in a physical and virtual space, in order to entertain and empower the audience. Curators are now considered to be tastemakers and validators and examples of influential ‘star curators’ who can make or break an artist’s career are not uncommon.

Henry Geldzahler’s 1969 exhibition New York Painters and Sculptors of 1940-1970 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art launched the career of a group of emerging artists such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, David Hockney and James Rosenquist. According to The New York Times: “Geldzahler was once dubbed the most powerful and controversial art curator alive.”

For the rising tide of contemporary Asian art, directional guidance was set by art curators from the developed world. Through a process of acknowledgement, recognition and creating opportunities to show Asian art in global exhibitions, international art curators played a pivotal role in consolidating the radical developments in art in Asia during the ’80s and ’90s. Survey exhibitions such as New Art from South Asia - 1992, organised by the Japan Foundation, the Asian art shows of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Apian Poshyananda’s Traditions / Tensions 1996 and Gao Minglu’s Inside Out: New Chinese Art 1998, both organised or co-organised by Asia Society New York, set the trend. In the year 2000, Pakistan: Another Vision, — Fifty Years of Painting and Sculpture from Pakistan, assembled by British curator Timothy Wilcox was shown at the Brunei Gallery in London. This was the first survey of historical and contemporary art from Pakistan.

Contemporary curators are evolving into roles not only of intermediaries but managers, leaders and innovators

Among these jet-setting curators’, few have detailed knowledge of the environment in which another country’s art is produced and thus are rarely in a position to ‘discover’ relatively unexposed artists. Their increasing reliance on informants to provide crucial contextual data reveal the inherent flaws in this practice. Fortunately, in Pakistan’s relatively small art milieu the curatorial effort has come mainly from within. The new millennium ushered in the concept of mega shows. This development saw the emergence of home-grown curators who orchestrated idea exhibitions to inform, educate and entertain the public. Researching the work of new artists and emphasising the need to archive the old, they initiated art scholarship and popularised the need for art catalogues.

Outstanding early curatorial projects include the Takhti Exhibition/Seminar, The Holy Sinner: Sadequain, ASNA Trinneial, Uraan, etc. Initial footprints abroad — exhibitions such as Beyond Borders, the first museum scale exhibition in India of contemporary Pakistani art and Desperately Seeking Paradise, the Pakistan Pavilion at Art Dubai 2008 — were homemade. The first US museum to focus on contemporary art from Pakistan was Asia Society Museum which in September 2009 presented Hanging Fire. Expressing the vitality and range of Pakistan’s little-known yet thriving art scene, the exhibition’s 50 artworks by 15 artists included installation art, video, photography, painting and sculpture.

Initially Salima Hashmi and Niilofur Farrukh gained prominence as well-respected and influential curators of purpose-oriented mammoth shows but the surge of new generation art in Pakistan was now in need of enablers who had the expertise and information to bring educative and entertainment value to their work. Amin Gulgee, Abdullah Syed, Naiza Khan and Adeela Suleman were foremost in the ‘artist as curator’ category that emerged. Their shows such as Body and Calligraphy, The Labyrinth, 6/6, Karachi Kiya and the Vasl platform exhibitions were memorable. Whilst the work of the artist as curator is indisputably curatorial it is still situated somewhere between curating and art. This changed when Sumbul Khan, holding a masters degree in art history with curatorial and cataloguing experience, challenged our notions of conventional gallery practice through her thought-provoking thematic exhibitions at the Poppy Seed Gallery in Islamabad. Today, the role of an independent curator is being fulfilled by Zarmeené Shah, an MA in critical and curatorial Studies from Columbia University.

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 2nd, 2017