Artists Minaa Haroon, Muhammad Muzammil Khan, Rafay Talpur and Raheela Abro each translate the ideas of inherited objects, artistic legacies, memories of confinement and the precariousness of nourishment through a distinctive visual language in their exhibition ‘Time and Traces’ at Canvas Gallery. Although the concerns of these four artists could hardly be more different at first glance, yet they overlap in their preoccupation with what time leaves behind.
The jewellery forms of Haroon are unmistakable, almost floating within dense, radiating patterns. Beginning with pieces inherited from her mother, she casts, carves and gilds their forms, embedding them in handmade paper and intricate geometric patterns. The colour of the ground intensifies the gold and dark blue motifs, while the rough edges of the handmade paper deliberately contrast with the precision of the miniature-like ornamentation. The result is apparent in works where necklaces and pendants appear almost suspended within radiating fields of turquoise, orange, blue and gold.
Minaa’s miniature training is apparent in her precision, but the layered paper, gold leaf and material experimentation take the work beyond conventional miniature painting. The jewellery remains recognisable as an object, while simultaneously becoming part of an abstract visual field.
The heirloom is neither preserved intact nor simply depicted — it is transformed into something closer to a map of memory. To my mind, it is this transformation of adornment into something approaching an abstract topography that is one of the more distinctive aspects of the exhibition.
Four artists examined the hidden lives embedded within objects, images and memories at a recent show in Karachi
Muzammil also engages with inheritance, though his is an explicitly artistic legacy. His father, Muhammad Rustam Khan, is a remarkably talented self-taught artist. The influence of his hyperrealistic portraits and the use of vibrant colours is evident in his son’s work. Muzammil responds by pushing against the restrained conventions of miniature painting and manipulating layers of wasli to create relief and depth.
His ode to his father through these portraits is technically impressive, but it is the contrast between faces of different ages that gives the series greater resonance. In one, a young woman, wrapped in a warm, ochre burqa looks away with an almost cinematic intensity. In another, an elderly man in a blue kurta and patterned turban confronts the viewer with a deeply furrowed face and meticulously rendered hands. Smoothness and weathering, youth and age become, quite literally, studies in the passage of time.
The most austere works in the exhibition are by Rafay. His compositions in stark black-and-white palette in drypoint (a printmaking technique using a sharp pointed tool to essentially ‘gouge’ a line into the metal), which initially appear to be simple studies of shadows, acquire a psychological dimension when one delves deeper into his intensely personal and disturbing emotional past.
His childhood experiences of punishment, confinement and darkness at a madrassa [seminary] inform this body of monochromatic works, in which black fields are interrupted by narrow passages of white. The white comes from the emotional release associated with light.
In one striking composition, vertical white strips penetrate rounded black forms, evoking bars, apertures or shafts of light. The imagery is deliberately sparse and this restraint is its strength. Rather than illustrating confinement, Rafay creates a psychological sensation of it, making the viewer conscious of how little light is available and how significant its presence becomes.
Raheela turns to something far more familiar: the apple and orange. In The Weight of the Rind, fruit becomes a vehicle for considering food security, inequality, sustainability and survival. She places the fruit almost ceremonially within an ornate frame, and her small, box-like presentations of an orange and an apple are particularly intriguing. Their almost shrine-like or specimen-case presentation makes ordinary fruit appear precious, vulnerable and strangely isolated, resembling specimens being preserved or objects whose availability can no longer be taken for granted.
The enclosing frames reinforce the ideas of preservation and scarcity, and the works are most persuasive when their symbolism is understated. An apple, isolated within an ornate frame against a green ground, acquires an almost precious status. The tension between abundance and fragility gives these modest subjects a wider significance.
Despite their disparate approaches, the four artists make ‘Time and Traces’ a coherent exhibition. Jewellery, faces, shadows and fruit become repositories of experience. The ‘traces’ are sometimes intimate and personal, sometimes inherited and sometimes connected to larger anxieties about survival.
What lingers most is the idea that nothing remains untouched by time: objects are transformed, faces weather, memories persist, light penetrates darkness and even something as ordinary as fruit can come to signify an uncertain future.
‘Time and Traces’ was on display at Canvas Gallery in Karachi from July 28-August 6, 2026
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 9th, 2026