SELECTED ESSAYS

The Space Around a Painting: An Afternoon at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Dunya Digital, December (2023)

“My conscious mind fell back on a formal appreciation of da Vinci’s sfumato, deployed in the features, and the expert interplay of sharp and indeterminate that makes a simulation – on wood – so metabolic. But the rest of my mind, the great, lurching vastness of it, saw, in that feverish gaze, the look of someone who…” (Read more)

Art and the Pandemic, The Aleph Review, 17th March (2022)

“But the pandemic forced many of us to reassess our relationship with creativity. It launched us into liquid rooms dislodged from time. During that first lockdown in the spring of 2020, with what suddenly seemed like all the time in the world, I found myself making a lot of useless art. But can any art be called that? And yet, shouldn’t all art be just that?” (Read more)

Stories Don’t Halt at Borders: Remembering India’s Partition, Image Journal, Issue 104 (2020)

“Nanto’s imagination was forever interlacing preludes and quests and denouements from different stories. In doing so, her stories came to reflect the collective memory of India itself…” (Read more)

Inner- and Outermost, ArtNow, July (2019)

“…our first impulse, when trying to describe how the internet has changed our experience of art, is to clutch at terms like ‘second-hand’, ‘mediated’, ‘virtual’, ‘vestigial’. We might say, looking at an astonishingly sharp image of a famous artwork, that it feels almost as if we were looking at the real thing. We realise that it is not the real thing, but we have made peace with the ‘almost’ aspect of it… ” (Read more)

“The Sense of an Ending”: The Art of the Moving Image, ArtNow, April (2019)

“…the moving image, better or more efficaciously than other media, recreates the peculiar ways in which image-sequences and fragments chase each other in our heads – entering, exiting, often re-entering, altered, and getting superimposed or replaced by newer fragments…” (Read more)

Why Artists Often Critique Rather Than Endorse Nationalism, Herald, January (2019)

“Historical and cultural legacies are hardly simple matters and that is why nationalism can be dangerous — it treats them as if they are…” (Read more)

For the Sake of Criticism, Eos, Dawn, 4th November (2018)

“““How can I tell if the art I’m seeing is good or bad?” she asked me, much to my alarm, for we who presume to write about art hardly know anymore how to respond to straightforward questions…” (Read more)

“Only Connect”: Drawing Interfaith Parallels Through Art, Encounters: The Art of Interfaith Dialogue, Brepols Publishers, 13th September (2018)

“Arranged against bejewelled and vivid backdrops in compositions that echo the schemes of medieval Christian works of art with their clusters of saints and choirs of angels surrounding Jesus, these bevies of Muslim preachers constitute a new kind of popular imagery…” (Read more)

The Art of Allegiance, Eos, Dawn, 29th July (2018)

“Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell, More’s chief adversary, now hangs across his portrait of More in the Frick Collection in New York. The coincidence not only illustrates the fickleness of power but the fickleness of artists who, as beneficiaries of power, had to shift allegiances to survive…” (Read more)

Biennials Reach Pakistan, as Do Their Merits and Demerits, Herald, May (2018)

“We may be making deliberate efforts to shake off unwanted, colonial legacies by both lamenting and celebrating our difficult pasts, but we are still catering to an essentially Western world view that continues to assert old divisions and parameters…” (Read more)

How Cities and Urbanisation Have Become Favoured Subjects for Artistic Expressions, Herald, November (2017)

“Our interactions with the cities we inhabit are now mediated by the bodies of our automobiles or the screens of our phones, laptops and televisions. A certain sense of tactile, physical familiarity with our surroundings has been lost in the process…” (Read more)

Contextual Trajectories, Eos, Dawn, 15th October (2017)

“My first viewing of it was filled with emotion unmediated by a complete knowledge of the context of its making. That knowledge arrived later, like a dignified, royal procession clearing its way through some of the brambles of raw effect…” (Read more)

Consumed by Wanderlust, Eos, Dawn, 6th August (2017)

“Separated from Dadd by half a century and an entire ocean, American artist Joseph Cornell — the gentle diorama-maker, the quiet wizard who lined boxes with condensed, segmented worlds — lived in New York all his life and the only travelling he did was to the city’s flea markets…” (Read more)

What Do We Buy When We Buy Art?, Eos, Dawn, 9th July (2017)

“The desire to possess something that lends gravitas and prestige to a life and a home also motivates spending on art. Art has a history of making new money look old…” (Read more)

Dotting the i’s and Crossing the t’s, ArtNow, June (2017)

“…this concept weakens under the ironic, quizzical, postmodern gaze – this concept of isolating the artist with a spotlight on a tenebrous stage, this penchant for viewing the artist through a peephole in his studio door, hard at work in the only world he is believed to inhabit. Identities are no longer different sets of clothing to be donned for different sets of tasks. They can and do conflate…” (Read more)

Where Are the Details?, Eos, Dawn, 13th May (2017)

“They are clip art, orphan visuals, the unnervingly generic illustrations of alphabet books — a mango from nowhere, a pair of leg-less pants with tactile creases frozen on them, an old man without a name or story or direction to shuffle off in, drawn rigidly out in overexposed permanence…” (Read more)

“We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on…”, ArtNow, December (2016)

“His colourful, sensitive land-interventions – his petal-trails, twig-wreaths, leaf-chakras, his stone-cairns and ice-stars, his undulating sand-trains – are the short-lived products of his time alone in nature with nothing but the dexterity of his hands and what basic tools the great outdoors can itself provide. The darker side of nature is not lost on him, though…” (Read more)

Consorting with the Four-Legged, ArtNow, September (2016)

“Going through images of Anwar Saeed’s multitudinous paintings, one feels – again – the pull of an oneiric world where fish and leopards cohabit savagely coloured edens with men who chose not to follow the signs back home…” (Read more)

Monuments to the Mind, ArtNow, June (2016)

“Making monuments is as much a mental act as it is a physical one. The bulk of monumentalising occurs in the mind, even if it is physical and calculable magnitude that is usually associated with monuments and their making…” (Read more)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Of Letters), ArtNow, July (2015)

“The Sick Rose, by Blake, is a trim and poignant piece of poetry and one does not need be acquainted with his legions of stocky angels and demons, slowly and with effort swirling in the universal scheme, to be moved by word pairings from the poem…” (Read more)

SELECTED EXHIBITION AND BOOK REVIEWS

Encounters With the Past, Eos, Dawn, 8th April (2018)

“The past is never a self-contained entity, something that we can study with scientific curiosity alone and then slide a stone slab over. It continues to shape and influence our lives and is fluid and indomitable, like an intent that cannot be thwarted, a memory that persists…” (Read more)

Understated Aesthetics, Eos, Dawn, 1st April (2018)

“The architecture of Mubarak Haveli — with its frugal geometry, its introspective layout, its balance of sun-bleached and stone-cool spaces — is as close to perfect as can be for a display of works by the late artists Lala Rukh and Zahoor ul Akhlaq…” (Read more)

Smorgasbord of Observations, Eos, Dawn, 25th March (2018)

“And we realise — looking, in particular, at a painting of a bookshelf — that, as a people once colonised and repeatedly conquered and converted, we are all displaced…” (Read more)

The Master Stroke, Herald, May (2017)

“His gauzy images, created with delicate washes of colour, looked to the glory of a pre-colonial past and – in terms of both style and content – evoked the art of his contemporaneous Bengal School. Yet Chughtai vehemently sought to disassociate himself and his work from the group of artists headed by Abanindranath Tagore…” (Read more)

Children of a Redder Earth, ArtNow, May (2016)

“Baloch has drawn and doodled, wiped, swiped, poured, scrubbed, stencilled, touched – with and on paint – to fashion landscapes that evoke, all at once, gauze patches and trelliswork, mosaics, leaf veins, the earth after rain, dried mud stains, fierce dust storms, and in the midst of these the intensely alive characters that appear completely at ease…” (Read more)

Speaking in Fragments, The Friday Times, 15th April (2016)

“Archaeology wields this magic. It can change the world, or our perception of it, in one glorious moment of unveiling. It is our closest, truest tie to history. It illustrates, faithfully, and does not caricaturise the stories and figures from our pasts. It tosses up dinosaurs, mammoths, and monsters among men…” (Read more)

Inchoate Worlds, ArtNow, May (2015)

“Architectural creation or, as Non-site makes clear, even architectural musing, is art with only the added and crucial element of possibility…” (Read more)

Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist: A Review, ArtNow, August (2014)

“This weave of scientific and mythical lends a magic realist quality to Obrist’s writing, making Ways of Curating anything but a set of instructions that one would expect (which is interesting because one of Obrist’s most unusual shows to date was do it, a DIY, transportable, disposable exhibition based on artists’ instructions)…” (Read more)