Most artist’s statements accompanying shows are an assortment of platitudinous postmodern speak, so audiences tend to ignore them. Imran Channa’s statement on his solo show at Canvas Gallery, titled ‘Tilism-i-Hoshruba.exe’, requires reading, however, as it is imperative to the understanding of his works.

When asked about the esoteric nature of the output, Channa, originally from Shikarpur and presently based in Amsterdam — where he teaches at the prestigious Gerrit Rietveld Academie — is nonchalant: “It is for the viewer to take what they want from the work. I don’t mind if there are elements not entirely peeled back or comprehended, as each viewer has a personal understanding.”

As writers and curators, the responsibility lies with us not to indulge in banal, predictable skirmishes with words but to provide context and offer informed criticism. And like all evocative artistic output across the world, there are fine gossamer-like layers of meaning in Channa’s work, compacted into one unified coherent, sometimes incognisable image or object.

The title of the show explains much of what Channa’s practice has been recently dedicated to. Most viewers would have missed the ‘.exe’ at the end of the title. Tilism-i-Hoshruba — loosely translated as ‘enchantment of the senses’ — is a book compiled in Urdu between 1883 and 1893 by Munshi Mohammad Hussain Jah and Ahmad Husain Qamar. It forms part of a larger epic fantasy, Dastaan-i-Amir Hamza [Tales of Amir Hamza], previously only known in the oral tradition of storytelling.

Imran Channa’s deeply contemplative artworks wrestle with our relationships with AI and our social condition

As it turns out, the ‘Tilism’ part of the title is almost unimportant and only serves as a backdrop to Channa’s narrative. ‘.Exe’ refers to an executable file on a computer, a file that the computer’s processor can run directly. When Channa writes in his statement “we live in a post truth era”, he is reflecting on the bright, burnished illusion of artificial intelligence manufactured at the speed of light, obscuring the lines between fact and fiction.

Channa asked AI to create wondrous landscapes of awe and beauty — panoramic vistas of natural glory with majestic mountains, ravines, cascading waterfalls. He then painted these scenes in detail with gouache on paper, but refrained from adding a human presence; the physical act thereby adding the only human intervention in the work. We notice that the scenes are excessively balanced and structured in their unity, as can be expected from an algorithm.

Channa then adds a strip of brass on the frame of the work, on which are inscribed a series of dots and dashes and a date. It is inscrutable, but he explains they are extracts of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s speeches — interpreted by AI — written in Morse code, accompanied by the date on which Jinnah said the words.

In one fell swoop, the landscapes take on the mantle of a murky, subversive discourse on our current social condition. They become a metaphor for promises made — when we were assured a land of great opportunity and potential. In this glorious view, we remember the lies told to us, our shattered dreams, our broken lives, our existence without prospect, honour or dignity.

The landscapes reference AI in the fact that LLMs and other artificial intelligence systems can produce comprehensible and credible outputs that are factually false or even entirely fabricated, and it is effectively impossible to differentiate between the two.

It is not insignificant that the exhibition opens in August, the month in which Pakistan gained its independence. The images of the horrors of the 1947 partition are from archived photographs of caravans moving across borders, people carrying the remaining fragments of their lives on a bullock cart or on their shoulders.

Channa significantly refers to Margaret Bourke White, an American photographer famous for her documentation of Partition and its resulting tragedies. The irony of a white woman becoming the major source of this archive is not lost on us.

Channa identifies objects of everyday use that would have been part of these caravans and prints them meticulously on a 3-D printer, each article requiring months in printing duration. The objects consist of a rolled mat, or chatai, a handful of beans (with yet another layer of meaning added with reference to a particular Sindhi folk lore), a weathered shoe, a kettle, small plate and, most interestingly, a gathri for which there is no English equivalent except perhaps a ‘bindle’.

Though monochromatic, cold and synthetic, these items manage to exude the emotive aspects of their owners. To deepen the poignancy, each is accompanied by a voice-over, with the text written by Channa himself, that speaks of the human anguish and trauma of displacement and loss.

Looking at Channa’s work, we get glimpses into his meticulous mind and deep emotion, his ‘un-artificial intelligence’, which so far only exists in a human creative mind. While Imran Channa is immersed in the research and teaching of art, he is also profoundly absorbed in the study of particle physics and the inevitability of AI as an alternate transformative force in the future.

The jury is still out on whether AI is detrimental or valuable. Besides the obvious damage of deception through fabrication, the real peril of AI is consciousness. There is the morbid and very real fear of AI becoming sentient. And perhaps what’s worse is the notion that humanity will, unwittingly, relinquish its own sentience in the process.

‘Tilism-i-Hoshruba.exe’ was on display at Canvas Gallery in Karachi from August 5- 13, 2025

The author is an independent art writer and curator

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 24th, 2025