When we acknowledge a relatively new but fundamental principle of art study, that art is material culture with definitive characteristics and specificities and contains the ability to move the maker and the viewer, it brings to the fore art’s ability to encompass psychology, anthropology, history, identity and all their wider influential properties.

Zarmeene Shah has curated work from a group of nine graduates from the M.Phil programme of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS). These practitioners graduated at different times during the previous two years, when Shah was Director Graduate Studies. The explorative, cerebral show at Koel Gallery, titled ‘Investigative Aesthetics’, allows the artists to chart their own course, unburdened by the confines of a curatorial dictate. As a result, we discover diverse research-based explorations, varying modes of determining discourse and a wide plurality of ideas.

Many of these practitioners have lived a few lives, so to say, before joining the programme, so even the individualisation is not angst-ridden but rather communal. It seems Shah has reiterated critical engagement with social, historical and community-based research that pertains to a greater good rather than individualistic catharsis, which is how meaningful post-grad studies are conducted.

There are, however, overlaps in the thematic structures of the exhibiting artists — three of the nine speak of trauma, two of generational trauma, a psychological buzzword that is used a tad too often in the recent milieu. But the disturbing times we live in call for the recognition of all shades of trauma: personal, professional, generational, communal, political, social and psychological — and the resultant effects thereof.

Nine artists excavated their own lives and pasts in a recent group show that attempted critical engagement with social, historical and community-based research

Halah Khan uses the term ‘hauntology’ to explain her video installation and talks of intergenerational trauma of loss and love. In the video, the artist transposes herself to seem like many generations of women meeting in space and time. The discourse of epigenetics and the imposition of the supernatural leans heavily towards nostalgia and it is limiting in its fundamental structure. Nostalgia can be empowering when it is used in revisionist practices to elevate marginalised or forgotten histories. But when it is used to sentimentalise personal memories, it becomes restrictive.

Naveed Siddiqui uses corrugated sheets with collage and fabric to reconstruct spatial forms that encompass stories of memory, displacement and trauma suffered during times of overarching violence, marginalisation, fear and ethnic killings in Karachi during the 1990s. These oral histories, sometimes too personal to narrate, may be eventually excluded from mainstream records, so it is vital they are documented and acknowledged. They offer a collective historical understanding of a city and give voice to a marginalised people, while they provide a universal context for larger socio-economic issues.

Sana Naqvi uses sewing and taarkashi as vehicles for understanding and incorporating the intergenerational trauma at the hands of the patriarchal system. She compares the familial trauma to the objects that comprise heirloom pieces, passed down through generations along with the legacy of a toxic bloodline. There is much anger in her words but she talks of the therapeutic nature of mending and sewing as a communal healing, together with the matriarchs of the family.

With Balochistan dominating domestic political news, it piques the viewer’s interest to see social commentary from within a once insular and isolated province. Anum Sanaullah has traced her Baloch lineage and her output is immersed in historical narratives that relate the marginalisation of the women amidst archaically strict tribal canons and conventions. But Sanaullah finds joy and love within the practices of her people, without rancour or bitterness to mar their everyday lives. She mentions the chappal doll the women make with their hands and there’s a yearning to visualise the doll.

Ghania Shams Khan, an architect by profession, seeks spirituality in built and natural spaces. On a trip to Balochistan, she serendipitously found transcendental elements in “a window ledge, and its shadow, located amidst a Juniper forest in Balochistan.” Her discoveries bring to mind Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s words in his book Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man: “…To desacralise nature is to estrange man from his own being; to desacralise space is to banish the remembrance of the Divine from the environment he inhabits.”

Mahreen Zuberi returns to the basics of art pedagogy in the colonial era, one of the many ways in which the Raj imposed its domination on a people they considered unschooled in the sophisticated traditions of the Empire. Dr. Alexander Hunter, E.B Havell and Rudyard Kipling were the few who came to ‘educate’ the ‘natives’ and establish our schools. They complained that there was too much insistence on craft and they would teach brown people pure art.

Zuberi reflects on the shift from a priori to observation as one of the many ways in which colonial teachings took place — a tradition that has prevailed. Her installation of a multitude of similar glass bottles, along with an audio presentation, engages the viewer to consider drawing the objects in terms of a logical structure, independent of visual observation.

Shamama Hasany explores the idea of spaces that are shaped by lived experiences and the ways in which they become comfortable, recognisable and true to our lives. There are three niches important to her: the bazaar, the home and the creative space. She then investigates ways in which these places can be part of her practice as an emotive quality of understanding and living, rather than a tangible environment.

Syed Safdar Ali recontextualises the dome from its architectural ubiquity, forcing us to observe it in a framework other than the religious symbolism atop the mosque. It takes on myriad forms when seen anew and, even though Ali has presented the domes in similar size, form and materiality, each one represents a different perspective — from bell jar to lid to the rendering of a stupa.

Zoya Abbas takes us though a heart-wrenching personalised journey of loss. Two redacted letters tell us of a tragic passing and a mother’s pain, while bundles of white cloth, set on a table that we are encouraged as viewers to interact with, are heavy with remorse and aching. The seeds in envelopes are also reminiscent of lives that could have been or were.

We appreciate that contemporaneity in art has vital undercurrents of conceptualism and artists fulfil their objectives as historians of the day, using ontological references and delving into paradoxes of absence and presence to continue several frequencies of discourse. Shah has done fine work leading these practitioners to existing and new spheres of discovery, allowing them to find their narratives within.

‘Investigative Aesthetics’ was on display at Koel Gallery in Karachi from October 23-November 11, 2025

The author is an independent art writer and curator

Published in Dawn, EOS, November 16th, 2025