KARACHI: It is always nice to see that interest in Karachi’s past getting increased by the day, especially the artist community’s quest to know more about how the city once looked like or came across as… is appreciable. One doesn’t know whether it helps 21st century Karachi’s infrastructural woes. Still, the past must be remembered to pave the way for the future.

It is in this connection that an exhibition titled Karachi Cartographies — Seeing the City through Art and Archives, which is taking place simultaneously at Canvas and Koel art galleries and will conclude on June 20, must be seen.

The cultural spaces have the following to say about the show: “[It] seeks to engage with the city using contemporary art and archival material (documents, maps, advertisements, photographs, books etc). All these materials serve to foreground multiple narratives about Karachi — how it once was, how it is now, and how it might yet become — including conversations about minorities, Manora, the securitisation of the city, climate change, and more.

“The project offers unique perspectives into the city of Karachi and views contemporary art as an expanded field and also as an investigative tool. Maps, mapping, and map making are a central theme of the project. This is a project of the Furqaan Ahmed Collection…”

The exhibition is informative as well as artistically pleasing. The reason for claiming this is that the viewer, among other exhibits, will find a good number of official documents signifying the formal life of the city in pre-partition days. There’s a particular decorum to it and the pieces on view also signify the pluralistic nature of Karachi in those days. Alongside that, are some remarkable artworks done by contemporary artists highlighting, in most cases, the plight of what Karachi looks like today and the rosy picture that it cut in the maazi.

Good stuff.

Published in Dawn, June 14th, 2026