Dialogues Across Time`, curated by Saira Danish Ahmed, was scheduled to open on August 19, but the city`s torrential rains that day left Karachi nearly paralysed, postponing the event by a week.

When it finally opened on August 26, it carried not only anticipation but also the significance of marking Chawkandi Art Gallery`s 40th anniversary.

The exhibition brought together 17 contemporary artists, each of whom selected a pioneering figure from the gallery`s early years and responded to that predecessor`s work. The selection revealed Chawkandi`s vast reach across painting, printmaking, ceramics, sculpture, abstraction and conceptual practices. The result was a dynamic conversation across generations, a bridging of past and present through art that felt as celebratory as it was contemplative.

Saira explains that this is not a retrospective but `a living dialogue an exploration of influence, legacy and continuity.` Each participating artist, she notes, selected a predecessor `whose work, personality, or visual language resonates with their own.

Since its founding in 1985, Chawkandi Art has been one of the defining institutions of Pakistan`s contemporary art scene. It provided a platform for experimentation at a time when critical discourse around modern art was still emerging in the country. Over four decades, it has nurtured many significant voices.

That history made the gallery not just the venue but also a character in the narrative a reminder of its role as a crucible for change and innovation.

Salima Hashmi, who has written and recorded the life and works of female artists in Pakistan, responded to her late friend Lubna Agha with Secrets of the Palm Remembering Lubna a nostalgic tribute to Agha`s feminist works of the 1970s and 80s. Her layered, thoughtful mixed media piece extended Agha`s visual vocabulary into a realm of personal reflection and poetic response, suffused with memory and shared history. The young Lubna Latif, as she was known before her marriage, had created a stir in 1971 with her solo exhibition of several totally abstract images. The hand in Hashmi`s mixed media reminded of the intricate dynamics of overlapping hands in Agha`s works.

Strobilus was the title of Laila Rahman`s graphite panel responding to Samina Mansoori.

By invoking rhythms of the female body through organic forms, Laila mirrored Mansoori`s explorations of connection and rupture.

Two other female artists, Amna Rahman and Farazeh Syed, responded to Anwar Saeed, one of Lahore`s most influential painters. Saeed`s characteristic male figurative works became touchstones for their responses.

Amna`s Staying in the Human World (Revisited) reframed his coded symbolism as a meditation on `the politics of looking`, while Syed`s diptych, Other Ways ofLove I and II, also drew imagery from Saeed`s canvases and reassembled it into her own narrative.

Haider Ali Naqvi`s graphite drawing, Numaish, drew attention as a response to the painter Mussarrat Mirza, who remains rooted in her city of Sukkur, distant from the mainstream hubs of art production in the country. Mirza`s light-filled imagery of Sindh`s landscapes and interiors carries a lyrical stillness and longing. Naqvi, in contrast, lives within Karachi`s sprawling urban environment and presented an aerial, crumpled map of the city behind glass.

At first glance, his response to Mirza`s paintings might seem a stark contrast, yet both works are meditations on place hers imbued with tranquillity, his with the layered chaos of the metropolis.

Together, they created a dialogue about geography, belonging and memory.

Responding to late Shahid Sajjad`s practice, New York-based Ruby Chishti sent Prisoner, a charcoal sketch of a vulnerable male figure, and Shy Caryatid, a tiny bronze of a woman hiding her face reflecting on strength, shame and vulnerability. Nurayah Sheikh Nabi, also responding to Sajjad, exhibited Conversations of the Natural World I, a collagraph and silkscreen shaped by extended stays in Hunza. Her reverence for natural forms links her directly with Sajjad`s ethos, who carved wood inspired by the Marma people of Chittagong.

Muzzamil Ruheel conversed with the late Zahoorul Akhlag, a giant of Pakistani modernism, whose practice explored calligraphy, geometry and spatial abstraction.

Ruheel`s installation, He Listens, I Ramble, used steel, string and screws to form an unreadable calligraphic line suspended in space. Shifting with each display, it embodied memory`s mutability.

Adeeluz Zafar entered into dialogue with the late Zarina Hashmi, the New York-based artist whose minimalist works explored borders, exile and memory.

Zafar`s diptych, engraved on vinyl and plexiglas, evoked Hashmi`s poignant themes of displacement.

His paper boat, Rohingyas Floatingon the Dark Sea, was ominous and fragile, while Dividing Line was a stark reminder of borders.

Known for his eerie toys wrapped in bandages, Zafar channelled Hashmi`s quiet metaphors instead of his own familiar imagery.

Noman Siddiqui responded to the late Sheherezade Alam, celebrated for her refined ceramics.

His sculptures, Sheherezade Aur Main, featured balloons in bronze, fibreglass and terracotta. Balloons, a recurring theme in his satirical practice, here become metaphors for fragility and commemoration, nodding to Alam`s grace, while asserting his own voice.

Ayessha Quraishi continued a dialogue with the late Imran Mir, one that began when her work was displayed alongside his at the `Manzar` exhibition in Qatar. Both investigated abstraction and the grid, but where Mir`s bore the sharp clarity of geometry, Quraishi`s dissolved into atmospheric rhythms and texture.

Danish Ahmed responded to Sumaya Durrani`s 2009 series Shahab-i-Saqib with three oils on irregular-shaped canvases. Durrani, trained in Western techniques yet immersed in Sufi philosophy, created art steeped in metaphysics.

Ahmed acknowledges her as pivotal in his journey into nonrepresentational form. His canvases were both tribute and continuation, offering what he calls `a vessel for the timeless human search for truth, presence and belonging.Marium Agha`s textile triptych She-Who-Looks-Back took inspiration from the late Tassaduq Sohail`s dreamlike paintings.

Agha`s Victorian women, reimagined with fetish masks, stood defiant amid surreal backdrops.

Munawar Ali Syed paid tribute to the late Salahuddin Mian, Pakistan`s pioneering ceramic artist, with clay tablets that echoed inscriptions on a takhti. The works, titled Khatooti-Mian, were inscribed with words central to Allama Iqbal`s philosophy.

Razin Rubin entered into a dialogue with Moeen Faruqi, long known for open-ended urban narratives. Rubin, however, turned inwards, drawing on family photographs. Her paintings, Sulaiman and the Red Accordion and Pansy in Her New Dress, based on her parents, are fragments of lived experience that echo Faruqi`s fictional yet familiar worlds.

R.M. Naeem`s Muqaam was a commanding portrait of Meher Afroz, who stands contemplatively before a red table, with a white diagonal beam slicing the background sky. Naeem describes it as capturing `a station of being.

It is both homage and personal dialogue.

Finally, Waseem Ahmed engaged with late Colin David, remembered for bold figurative nudes. Ahmed`s veiled figures from his Burqa series provided a striking counterpoint: `Where David revealed, I conceal.

The work highlighted tensions around freedom, conformity and visibility in Pakistani society.

`Dialogues Across Time` did not simply commemorate the past, it extended it. By bringing together artists from different generations, the exhibition demonstrated how legacies are never static.

At Chawkandi Art Gallery, predecessors did not stand as monuments but as living presences, shaping and being reshaped by artists of today. The exhibition reminds us that art`s greatest gift is its capacity for conversation one that bridges time, nurtures memory and ensures continuity across generations.

`Dialogues Across Time` was on display at Chawkandi Art Gallery in Karachi from August 26-September 1, 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