When an erudite art collector decides to curate an exhibition collated from his private collection, a profound precedent is set for curatorial praxis and private patronage in Pakistan.
Dr Furqaan Ahmed has been a committed art collector for about two decades now. But for the practising doctor of medicine, it has not been about stocking his warehouse with canvases and installations. His interest has been immersive — visiting biennales around the world, holding conversations with globally renowned artists, participating in discourse with other artists — all the while learning, reading and researching.
The doctor has published three well-investigated books on different aspects of his collections. No other collector has gone this far in the service of art in Pakistan, as many are wary of the rap of the taxman. Taimur Hassan is the only other art collector in Pakistan who has contributed substantially to the art scene, exhibiting groundbreaking exhibitions at his celebrated Como Gallery in Lahore.
But while the exhibition ‘Karachi Cartographies — Seeing the City Through Art and Archives’ at Canvas Gallery and Koel Gallery in Karachi explicates a remarkable concept of visually illustrating the evolving lay of the land and its environs, it brings to the front some questions about empirical data versus aesthetic intervention. The structural vulnerability of ‘Karachi Cartographies’ lay in its inability to translate raw archival material into a cohesive visual vocabulary.
ARCHIVE AS NOSTALGIA?
The inclusion of large, innumerable city maps and architectural blueprints functioned more as a scientific index than a phenomenological exploration of space. Rather than treating these maps as static, objective data, the curatorial framework required a strategy that would have transformed them into lived sites — liminal spaces where audiences could negotiate a relational, temporal and individualised sense of place.
An exhibition that explored the city of Karachi through archival maps, documents and exceptional contemporary artworks shone brightest when the participating artists viewed the city through their own distinctive lenses
In the mind of the artist, maps become expressions of transient and fleeting geographies that are layered, complex and contingent. Artists such as Roohi Ahmed, who stitches maps with needle and thread on to fabric, acknowledge and employ the modules of creation by which art-cantered practices situate personal manifestations of place and layout, and make it personal. The map becomes home, neighbourhood, places of security or danger or boundaries crossed and kept. It is then that geography has meaning.
A map becomes a means of storytelling, like Naveed Siddiqui tells us in his assemblage of corrugated cardboard, and a presentation of data evolves into a compelling narrative. In the hands of the cartographer, the map is a scientific production, a tool for geographers and topographers and pilots and weather forecasters. The non-curator wants us to see these maps as historians. In the realm of artistic output, the possibilities are infinite.
Archival documentation of past events and experiences offers absorbing insights and perceptions into an unimaginable era. It is storytelling in black and white; validations of a dreamscape in sepia. While these historic fragments possess an inherent bricolage charm, they lack the artistic mediation required to address the power-laden relationships between past and present. They remain structural anomalies that belong more properly within the domain of institutional critique or an ethnographic museum, rather than a contemporary art space.
It is true that archival material plays a vital role in the development of art in artists’ narratives of memory, loss, reminiscence, belonging and displacement — some of the most common thematic inferences used today by artists globally, especially by artists in flux. But the curator/collector endeavours to show us the aura of the city through the eyes of his own family’s memorabilia as standalone nostalgia of times past with no analogous artistic intervention.
The part of the exhibition that consists of artists’ work is in itself quite spectacular and would have held the show without the excessive display of maps and archives. In themselves, they collectively speak of the complexities of a city, past and present, while stretching epistemological boundaries — everything required of a great show encompassing the changing face of an old city.
The curator/collector may have been cognisant of the fact that these works have been in the public eye before and an effort at curatorial novelty had to be exerted.
THROUGH THE ARTIST’S LENS
The opus-looking book sold at the event is only an accompanying catalogue documenting the show. But the real showstopper of the exhibition is the activity book created by the artist Sophia Balagamwala that serves as a vital piece of institutional pedagogy.
Balagamwala bypasses ponderous, postmodern critical theory in favour of an accessible, universal visual language. By effortlessly translating complex avant-garde concepts into an interactive format, she invites a democratic engagement with art. The booklet allows children to introduce their own gestural mark-making directly on to the page, subverting the traditional, passive viewership of the white-cube gallery setting.
Some of the most cerebral works on display are by Seema Nusrat, who injects found objects and fabrics with perceptively disassociated ideas and startles us out of our composure of everyday seeing. The common jute bag of rice morphs into a gunny bag for transporting a corpse, suggestive of the political violence that had clamped the city of Karachi in its grip over several decades. On it she transposes a beautiful vintage found tapestry, but the sack hangs ominously, as if tied hurriedly to conceal an object of conflict. Menacing road signs are treated ceremoniously to look like house facades.
Fazal Rizvi employs a minimalist formalism, utilising coded, rhythmic lines akin to musical notations to chart the temporal ebb and flow of the ocean. His long horizontal pieces, stripped of distracting visual expression, are remarkable representational paradoxes of angst and relief.
Jovita Alvares and Veera Rustomjee are both young, superlative artists who have recorded their minority family heritage as part of the larger community evolution of Karachi. Alvares uses old vernacular photography to map the physical and emotional geometry of migration from Goa to Karachi, transforming personal history into a broader narrative of cultural integration.
Rustomjee’s snippets of memory are Kafkaesque in their recollective value — wry and sardonic. They speak of the complex relationship between her Persian heritage and the myriad family tradition and influences.
Together, these two artists tell us more about the longstanding tradition of Karachi being the city that happily embraced diversity and built its complexity with gusto rather than ire. They talk of racial integration and the ensuing intangible losses suffered over the years more deeply than two dozen manuscripts and correspondences with governmental municipalities that we see spread across the exhibition, which are fascinating in themselves but belong in an archival museum.
WAYS OF SEEING
We can recall Zarmeene Shah’s exhibition of Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS) graduate students in 2025, who delved into their eclectic histories to define critical engagement with the community and the abundance of archival material it brought to the fore within their visual dissertations.
The way in which the artist Naiza Khan has seen, recorded and documented the evolution of the island of Manora could have been the definitive conceptual blueprint for this exhibition. She uses maps and archives for the purpose of mark-making. Through her artistic output, Khan shows us the traumatic transitions that have taken place in Manora, the island that acts as a reflective microcosm of the country. Khan documented through her works the state’s failed promises of modernisation and progress, and the literal whitewashing of the local people’s social and cultural traditions.
Here, Khan takes a page from an almanac picturing the lens of a telescope and makes it the foundational source of a series of artworks, wherein the lens became the eyes and the visual descriptor. In that simple but complex linkage is a densely packed curatorial lesson.
‘Karachi Cartographies — Seeing the City Through Art and Archives’ was on display at Canvas Gallery and Koel Gallery from June 2-20, 2026
The author is an independent art writer and curator
Published in Dawn, EOS, June 28th, 2026