There is something wonderfully paradoxical about ‘Borrowed Sky’, Farrukh Shahab’s latest body of work at Mainframe Art Gallery.
His birds are everywhere: flying, perched, nesting, converging and sometimes appearing to emerge from human figures. Yet the sky they inhabit is not entirely their own. It is borrowed, like the images from which the artist constructs most of his paintings.
Shahab’s practice as a visual artist, curator and educator spans nearly four decades. Based in Karachi, he has been working on his bird series ever since his engagement with Fariduddin Attar’s The Conference of the Birds. But while Attar’s allegorical journey remains an important point of departure, ‘Borrowed Sky’ is less concerned with illustrating the Persian mystic’s narrative than with what happens to images, memories and identities as they travel through time.
Shahab’s birds are also a means of exploring transformation and the desire to transcend the confines of the familiar. His technique is central to this process. He works over old museum posters and prints — fragments of art-historical imagery, layering paint and drawing over images that have already lived another life. He does not completely obliterate what lies beneath: traces remain, allowing different times and histories to coexist on the same surface. The old image becomes both foundation and something to be challenged.
Farrukh Shahab’s latest body of work layers imagery of birds and art-historical fragments into paintings that explore memory, identity and transformation
There are precedents for artists making use of already printed material and painting over it. The Austrian artist Franz West made collages from printed magazine pages that he painted over. Closer to home, Indian artists Bhupen Khakhar and Atul Dodiya have incorporated imagery from film posters, calendars and advertisements, often painting over or around them. Pakistani-American artist Huma Bhabha’s layered and nuanced treatment of photographic imagery also comes to mind.
Similarly, the underlying image in Shahab’s works remains an active part of the finished work, participating in its meaning even as it is obscured, interrupted or transformed by his interventions.
This is particularly evident in Vestige, where Frida Kahlo’s face is surrounded, rather invaded, by birds. Their elongated bodies and extravagant plumage spill across the surface, while fragments of handwriting and the ghostly remains of the original image continue to show through. Kahlo’s direct, enigmatic gaze provides a striking counterpoint to the restless flock.
Shahab’s lines in this solo show are vigorous, spontaneous and often deliberately unresolved. Contours are retraced, crossed and redirected, creating movement and giving the birds an almost animated quality. At their best, these layers make the paintings feel excavated rather than simply painted. At times, however, the accumulation becomes so dense that forms compete for attention and the compositions verge on visual overload.
This is both the strength and weakness of the series. Shahab embraces exuberance, but his works are most successful when that exuberance is tempered by moments of stillness and clarity. His handling of colour is expressive. Acidic greens, oranges, turquoises, reds and pinks collide with greys, blacks and muted earth tones. A brightly coloured bird can suddenly emerge from a subdued ground with surprising effect.
The two Convergence paintings demonstrate this approach particularly well. Meanwhile, the birds in the larger work, Convocation, are neither wholly naturalistic nor entirely fantastical — some verge on the human, including a striking foreground creature with elongated legs and feet. The flock becomes less a depiction of birds than a gathering of personalities, memories and possibilities.
However, there is no clearly defined spiritual destination, no equivalent of Attar’s Simurgh waiting at the end of the journey. Instead, Shahab gives us movement, multiplicity and transformation. His birds seem to be searching for somewhere to belong.
The artist’s stated concerns with memory, identity and transcendence are certainly present, but the works are more interesting when they are allowed to remain ambiguous. The birds may suggest spiritual longing, but they can equally be fragments of memory, projections of the imagination, or creatures that have escaped from the images beneath them.
This is perhaps where the old museum posters acquire their greatest significance. Museums classify, preserve and assign objects to particular times and cultures. Shahab disrupts that fixed order. He paints over the inherited image, draws across it and introduces new creatures and narratives. What was once a finished image becomes raw material for something personal.
Moreover, there is something distinctly Karachi-like in this visual density, in particular where the crows appear. There are forms jostling for space, colours colliding, histories and identities overlapping rather than remaining neatly compartmentalised. This exhibition ultimately asks what we inherit and what we can transform into our own.
The sky may be borrowed, but the flight is his own.
‘Borrowed Sky’ was on display at Mainframe Art Gallery in Karachi from August 29-September 5, 2026
Rumana Husain is a writer, artist and educator. She is the author of two coffee-table books on Karachi, and has authored and illustrated 90 children’s books
Published in Dawn, EOS, September 20th, 2026
