Curated shows hold tremendous potential in initiating discussions that broaden the approach to art. In Pakistan, commercial galleries have been the prime spaces for introducing newer artists or showcasing the works of established artists.

They have been the resource for discussion and critique in the absence of museums and funding bodies.

However, the opening of global markets since around the 2000s has seen dispersed centres and displaced narratives meandering and co-existing simultaneously within different time zones and cultural contexts. To keep pace and to engage with art-making and its processes is more complicated now than ever before.

The bombardment of visual information and viewpoints on social media has provided open access, but AI (artificial intelligence) has lent uniformity in the structural format of big and small shows internationally. Be it the tone of curated narratives or terminology used by artists and curators, there has been a gradual rise in copycat culture within the Pakistani art circuit and its diasporas, where one senses a great deal of pride felt in replicating a slickness or theatricality, under the guise of `internationalism`.

However, curatorial narratives that bring into discussion the works of artists who have contributed significantly in the past provide an opportunity to view works that have been hidden in private collections.

At the show `Fictional Truths: Narrative Painters of Pakistan`, held recently at the Chawkandi Art Gallery, paintings by Lubna Agha, Colin David and Sadequain lent depth to the curatorial narrative.

Agha`s canvas Night and Day is from1995. It was part of four or five paintings from 1993-95 that depicted severed bodies and limbs, as observed by Dr Akbar Naqvi in his book Image and Identity. Coming full circle now, these works were introduced at Chawkandi Art in 1993 in a private showing, followed by another show in 1996. The most iconic of these was Agha`s portrayal of the burial procession of a corpse shrouded in red. Titled Eternal Rest, it was part of `An Intelligent Rebellion`, a landmark show of women painters from Pakistan, curated by Salima Hashmi, at Cartwright Hall, Bradford, in 1994.

It is interesting how a curator`s choice can allow entry into the narrative from different perspectives, providing the margin for discussion. Artist curators Sheherbano Husain and Zoya Currimbhoy locate nuanced and unresolved moments of history and artistic practices. As is obvious from the title, the show leans towards investigating storytelling primarily via figurative painting.

The works of Sadequain, Agha, David and Tassaduq Sohail are integrated with a group of contemporaries such as Asim Butt, Ali Azmat, Ahmed Ali Manganhar, Faiza Butt, Naira Mushtaq, Amna Rahman, Moeen Faruqi, and the artist curators Husain and Currimbhoy themselves.

The curation provides a welcome uneven ground for discourse, allowing for a shift from the focus on sales to engaging with the art borrowed from collections, to form renewed connections. It is the genre of `storytelling about a moment or series of random events, with the intention of conveying universal truths,` reveals Husain.

Her co-curator, Currimbhoy, referencing her own approach, is concerned with `the death of the narrator, a scene in flux, a moment both witnessed and rewritten, and uncertainty that comes when control over a story is lost.In literary terms, the death of the narrator suggests that the reader`s interpretation is what ultimately gives meaning to a text. In his essay `Death of the Narrator`, Roland Barthes argues that the author`s role is to create the text, not to control its interpretation. The shift in perspective, he writes, emphasises the reader`s active role in creating meaning, rather than passively receiving it from the author.

Within this wide lens, Husain and Currimbhoy provide multiple frames of viewership.

The predominant figurative element is visible in nuanced layers. The late Asim Butt`s haunting self portrait confronts the viewer`s gaze. Amna Rahman`s portraits, Aqsa and Samya, look directly into the viewer`s eyes, while Azmat`s stylised female figure rests oblivious to the artist and viewer`s intrusive gaze.

Sadequain`s undated Portrait ofa Girl, probably from the 1960s, is placed in close proximity to Faruqi`s new works, Narratives from the Disconnected City and Voyeurs in Our Midst from 2025. Faruqi`s division of space and imagery is influenced by German expressionists and conveys the interplay of charged personal and social spaces that we also sense in the book Moth Smoke Mohsin Hamid`s fictional characterisation of social circles in Lahore. These are strong, emotive anchors.

The curators` intention to disregard hierarchies of stature is well appreciated for its openness. However, can you really dissociate context from content? Manganhar`s large canvas titled Perpetual War is perhaps the most convincing and nuanced narrative, retrieving the past in the present.

Manganhar recreates a scene from Rembrandt`s famous Night Watch (1642).

Manganhar creatively brings the subject of war and occupation through Rembrandt`s depiction of the Dutch guard company getting ready for a march a diligent study of the master`s complex cubistic placement of figures.

There is much to be read in Manganhar`s defacement of the figures and critique of colonisation. There are discussions waiting to happen on the practice of copying from reproductions of European masterpieces, and what artist and gallery owner Ali Imam termed as the `line of appropriation.

We meander into a grouping of Sohail`s fantastical,eerie landscapes with nymphs and monsters from the 1990s next to dark, minimalistic landscapes in oil from 1988 and 1992 by David. It is a baffling and unpredictable setting because Sohail`s frenzied imagery speaks more to Currimbhoy`s psychedelic and equally frenzied figures in acrylic and oil on plexi-glass from 2025, and to Husain`s dreamscapes, loaded with the influence of childhood stories such as the Grimms` Fairytales and reproductions of English landscapes, collages that draw effortlessly from European art history.

These meeting points are also to be found in UK-based Pakistani artist Faiza Butt`s recent imagery of bearded men floating inutopian dreams capes, in multiple visual perspectives. With Mushtaq`s painted family group cutting a cake, referenced from an archived photograph from1992, we enjoy a sensitive archiving of the personal.

The youngest artist here, Mushtaq reflects the maturity to tune out the outside noise, just like the stillness in David`s canvases.

`Fictional Truths: Narrative Painters of Pakistan` was on display at the Chawkandi Art Gallery in Karachi from February 20-March 3, 2025 The writer is an independent art critic, researcher and curator based in Karachi