'Echoes of the Unseen’, at the Sanat Initiative in Karachi, presents Javaid Mughal’s most assured body of work to date, and perhaps his most urgent too. 

The Lahore-based artist, born in 1987, has long been interested in those who labour along the margins of culture: the performers, workers and dreamers who shape collective life but are strugglers and rarely acknowledged. This exhibition gave them form, weight and dignity, while also probing the fragile space between visibility and disappearance. 

Mughal’s background as a cinema board painter is crucial to understanding his aesthetic language. Before entering a formal art school and earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) at Punjab University College of Art and Design (2015) and a Master of Arts with Honours at the National College of Arts (NCA) in 2018, he honed his skills painting vast, commercial-scale images. This apprenticeship trained his hand in figurative realism but also in scale, texture and spectacle. Alongside this, he studied calligraphy and graphic design, which introduced layering and rhythm to his surfaces.

The exhibition’s most compelling group of artworks, Music of Contrast, confronts the colonial genealogy and precarious survival of brass bands in Pakistan. These baja groups, with their red uniforms and glittering instruments, have become an almost kitsch shorthand for weddings. Yet, Mughal pushes beyond spectacle. His compositions chart a dwindling presence: from six musicians against a dense black ground, to five, then four, until only three remain on a pale, near-white field. What begins as pageantry slips into silence.

Drawing on his roots as a cinema hoarding painter, Javaid Mughal brings visibility and dignity to those who labour on the margins of culture

The works also press viewers to reckon with layered histories. Brass bands entered South Asia via Scottish regiments during the colonial period, when bagpipes and martial music were imposed as instruments of order. Over time, local musicians appropriated these forms, embedding them into public celebrations. Yet, Mughal’s canvases ask: what does it mean that a colonial relic has become a sonic emblem of festivity?

And what does it mean, further, that this emblem is itself now vanishing, displaced by DJs (disc jockeys) and digital sound systems? The paintings are thus double echoes of colonial histories and of traditions already fading from the urban soundscape. 

Other works in the show approached similar questions of presence and erasure. In The Unscripted Conversation 1 and 2, Mughal depicted theatre actors in rehearsal and performance. In the first, their gestures are tentative, exploratory. In the second, they animate the stage, while the audience sits with their backs to us. The choice unsettles: what does it mean to watch an audience rather than the performance? Mughal seems to suggest that spectatorship itself is a form of absence, a refusal to truly see.  

Loads of Silence, a painting of railway coolies, extends this concern to labour. Here, men bend under the weight of other people’s possessions, balancing precarious bundles with a grace that is rarely acknowledged. Mughal isolates and monumentalises them, not with sentimentality but with a quiet insistence that their work be seen. 

What emerges across the exhibition is Mughal’s sensitivity to rhythm — visual, historical and cultural. His layering of figures against shifting tonal grounds feels almost musical, echoing the way sounds persist after fading. Yet, there is also critique. His works insist that Pakistan’s cultural inheritance is being steadily diminished, whether through economic insecurity, technological shifts or the blunt erasures of modernisation. 

Mughal has already received considerable recognition: the ADA Painting Award and Anna Molka Award (2021), the Arjumand Painting Award (2019) and the Emerging Talent Prize at VM Art Gallery (2015). His international selections in London and California confirm his reach. But ‘Echoes of the Unseen’ suggests a new maturity: an artist no longer content to merely depict overlooked figures, but intent on interrogating the cultural structures that make them invisible.

By the end of the show, one left with a sense of tension. Mughal’s paintings are deeply rooted in the textures of Lahore — its bands, its theatre troupes, its railway stations — yet they speak to a larger truth about South Asian modernity: that culture is most often carried by those who remain unseen, until someone insists we look.

‘Echoes of the Unseen’ was on display at the Sanat Initiative in Karachi from September23-October 2, 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, October 19th, 2025