In ‘The Anatomy of Becoming’, Mohsin Shafi returns to Karachi with a deeply personal and richly layered body of work. His latest solo show at Canvas Gallery isn’t merely a visual presentation — it is an excavation of identity, longing, resistance and the delicate construction of selfhood in a society that often demands erasure.

Describing himself on Instagram as a “bohemian/dreamer/observer/thinker/struggler/radical/visual storyteller/sort of an artist”, Shafi lives up to this self-portrait. His practice, ranging from collage and textiles to performance and archival interventions, traces the tender, often bruised terrains of memory, desire and socio-political marginalisation. In a country where lives lived outside the expected remain hyper-visible and yet profoundly denied, his work quietly resists and re-imagines.

This is not Shafi’s first engagement with these themes. I recall seeing his 2017 mixed-media installation This is Not the Way Home, shown at the inaugural Karachi Biennale, which posed urgent questions about visibility, safety and the burden of existing outside the rigid binaries of gender and conventionality.

That work also signalled a preoccupation with how bodies are read, policed and remembered. In ‘The Anatomy of Becoming’, that preoccupation continues, but with a gentler, more introspective tone. There is pain, but also humour, tenderness and defiant beauty. These works are acts of care as much as they are of critique.

Humour, tenderness and defiant beauty converge at a deeply personal art exhibition in Karachi

At the centre of the exhibition are evocative photo collages. Symbolic and emotionally charged, they fold Mughal motifs into contemporary settings, place couples alongside temples and decaying architecture, and gesture toward a space where heritage and identity converse rather than clash. Shafi’s compositions reclaim a complex cultural memory, not to escape Pakistan, but to re-imagine it.

One of the works is Confession of a Secret Lover (2017–ongoing), an installation of found and ‘stolen’ domestic objects, such as a metal saag cutter imbued with memory. These tactile remnants from a fading domestic past evoke kitchens, mothers and quiet everyday rituals. For older generations, they are steeped in nostalgia, while for younger viewers they become a bridge to lost textures of Pakistani life.

In Dewana Pun — made with silk paint, thread and beads on silk — Shafi revisits the trauma of being mocked for his body hair as a child. The artwork becomes a reclamation of the body, not as a site of shame but of lush affirmation. Here, intricate embroidery becomes a form of healing and the delicacy of the materials contrasts poignantly with the weight of the memory.

Equally compelling is The Adventures of Insomnia in Cosy Nights, a hand-cut collage set within a wooden shadow box. Combining photo transfers and watercolour, the work feels like a surreal, dreamy escape — a fevered response to the artist’s insomnia. In this piece, insomnia is not merely a condition but a creative companion, filled with both melancholy and wit. It speaks to the emotional toll of living outside accepted norms in Pakistan, where dreaming itself becomes subversive.

Shafi’s artist statement for the show is as poetic as the pieces themselves, stating, “Memory doesn’t archive; it contrives”, and later describing memory as a “gravity field.” His practice doesn’t aim to document reality but rather to refashion it. It is an act of survival in a world where truth often needs to be coded, camouflaged or whispered.

The exhibition’s title, ‘The Anatomy of Becoming’, suggests a clinical dissection, yet what unfolds is lyrical. Rather than mapping the body in physical terms, Shafi maps the emotional topographies of grief, nostalgia, exile and desire. His works pose deeply personal yet universal questions: what does it mean to belong to a family, a culture or even to oneself? His collages evoke children’s pop-up books, inviting viewers into a world of layered, unstable memory that is constantly interrupted and reassembled. These are not simply visual stories — they are ritual acts of remembering and resisting.

Shafi is based in Lahore and a graduate of the National College of Arts (NCA). He is acutely aware of the boundaries within which he operates. His work is bifurcated: pieces that speak directly to his identity often find their place abroad, while those shown in Pakistan are coded, layered and nuanced. This imposed duality has, paradoxically, honed his craft, leading to multi-voiced works that speak in both symbols and silences.

In ‘The Anatomy of Becoming’, we witness an artist holding a mirror to cultural tensions between tradition and modernity, memory and forgetting, intimacy and repression. His brilliance lies in inhabiting that space “between translation and interpretation”, where identity is fluid, language is unstable and fragility is strength.

As we exit the exhibition, we carry with us a lingering ache. Shafi offers no loud declarations, no didactic messaging. Instead, he speaks in fragments, in textures, in whispers. In a world where vulnerability is often dismissed, his art insists that it can be a form of resistance and, perhaps, the most enduring kind.

‘The Anatomy of Becoming’ was on display at Canvas Gallery in Karachi from July 22-31, 2025

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, August 3rd, 2025