KARACHI: These days, the creative community seem to have found renewed energy in highlighting fine art and literature’s interrelatedness. Eminent artist Farrukh Shahab is one of them. His fascination with the 12th century Persian poet Fariduddin Attar’s long poem The Conference of the Birds has led him to come up with striking paintings, linking not only two different time periods, but also discovering the connection between poetry and colours.
An exhibition of Shahab’s artworks titled Borrowed Sky, which concluded at the Mainframe Art Gallery on Saturday, is in continuation of this idea.
Talking to Dawn, Mr Shahab said, “This is the fifth in the series of my exhibitions initially inspired by Attar’s poem. I tried to read the poem in Persian and then its Urdu translation. I think it has been translated into 30 or 40 languages, and I’m aware that there have been films based on The Conference of the Birds. I discovered that there are so many subjects within this one text that even if you keep working your whole life, they won’t end. So I attempted to have my own interpretations from the poem because it has numerous references and stories.
“Then I focused on the form of the birds. More than 20 years ago, in London, I used to have magazines on which I worked with things like markers because I didn’t have enough material to work with. I took them back home in Karachi. Three years back, in the first show of this series, I did some stuff on magazines. The focus was on ‘form’. In this ongoing exhibition, work is done on some museum posters that I have been gathering for more than three decades. I have painted my own narratives and stories of them.”
The artist’s juxtaposition of the old and the contemporary is worth spending time with. In that regard paintings such as ‘The unremembered place’, ‘Unmoored’ and the ‘Convergence’ series are powerful examples. The past and the present come together, along with the birds that are the central characters in each piece, as if there’s not much to separate them — the present is a more kinetic version of the past.
Published in Dawn, September 6th, 2026
