The 11-year religious dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq profoundly shaped the art of Pakistan. After the general’s successful coup in 1977, his regime ushered in martial law, trampled on women’s rights, enforced strict censorship and placed draconian restrictions on artistic expression.
Ascent of Man, an abstract painting by Quddus Mirza, is inspired by the controversial trial and hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the democratically elected prime minister overthrown by the coup. The painting, part of a groundbreaking exhibition of Pakistan’s art and architecture, depicts a man sitting in a chair while a headless body floats in the sky. It blends elements of magic realism with an allusion to the seventh-century martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali, a grandson of the prophet Muhammad whose death was a major episode in Islam’s history that still resonates today.
“Under Zia-ul-Haq, artists, playwrights and novelists found a way to subvert,” says Mirza, whose works are among 200 featured in the exhibition, titled Manzar: Art and Architecture from Pakistan, 1940s to Today. “It was a turning point – that subversive language changed the art of Pakistan for good.”
Hosted by the National Museum of Qatar in Doha, the show highlights the connection between Pakistan’s cultural heritage and contemporary practices, while connecting it to broader global artistic and architectural movements. Manzar is an Arabic and Urdu word meaning “scene”, “view” or “perspective” – a reference used to underscore the diversity of the exhibition. The exhibition is organised by the forthcoming Art Mill Museum (AMM), a showcase of modern and contemporary art due to open in Doha “in a few years’ time”.
From art coinciding with the time of the partition of India in 1947, such as the works of leading painters Ustad Allah Bakhsh and Abdur Rahman Chughtai, to the neo-miniature paintings of Shahzia Sikander and Imran Qureshi, calligraphic modernism by the likes of Sadequain, and the feminist art of Salima Hashmi, the exhibition features artworks spanning eight decades.
Mirza says General Zia-ul-Haq’s era ultimately led to the establishment of the neo-miniature and Karachi Pop movements. He says the exhibition is unique in including pre-1947 works as well as those from neighbouring India and works from Bangladesh prior to 1971. Curators Caroline Hancock, Aurélien Lemonier and Zarmeene Shah have used political posters, magazines, film ads and examples of popular culture to bring context to the exhibition, and also show “architecture and art side by side”.
Mirza is critical of the term “Pakistani art”, because he believe the roots of the region’s artistic legacy “are far deeper and more inclusive” than to the land carved in 1947, when Pakistan was created. “In Pakistan, we have always been trying to find our identity,” the artist says. “For some it is being south Asian, for others it is being Muslim, which means that we are not really clear about our identity. There is a confusion and a question. But this has positively added into the diversity of art from Pakistan. There is a great mix.”
The exhibition delves into artistic movements including the Mughal-inspired miniature tradition, modernist innovations and contemporary experiments in neo-miniature art. Some of the works exhibited have never before been loaned or seen outside Pakistan. Shah, the co-curator from Karachi, says the show was intended to steer clear of “nationalistic tropes”. She adds: “There has been no exhibition of this scope and scale – in Pakistan or outside. Exhibitions like Manzar destabilise the hegemony of narrow, linear, western art-historical perspectives and narratives and present alternative modes of seeing.”
A feminist voice included in the show is Naiza Khan, who in 2019 was the first ever artist to represent Pakistan at the Venice Biennale. “This is a seminal exhibition, ambitious in scope and scale,” Khan says, stating that the show evoked “a sense of pride”.
“It is the first major exhibition of art and architecture from Pakistan in the region. Doha has a large community of the south Asian diaspora that live and work there, which creates another web of context and relationship for the community.”
Khan completed a BA in fine art at Oxford in 1990. She then moved to Karachi and forged a close relationship with the ocean and its connection with the landmass of Africa and beyond. She has been fascinated with the idea of “mapping space”, and concerned with environmental justice and the exploitation of land. Sticky Rice and Other Stories is a filmic installation at Manzar that traces a mental map of the region around Karachi, from the colonial textile trade to containerised cargo shipping.
Hundreds of Birds Killed – Khan’s artwork at Venice – is a combination of brass maps and a soundscape of the weather, which has its roots in a 1939 archival weather report in colonial India found by Khan in the ruins of an observatory on Manora Island, south of Karachi. “I was fascinated by the visual tabulation of weather data across the pages of this report,” she says. “It was detailed, specific and engineered, and revealed the dichotomy between imperial mapping and every day reality. Since this project, I am thinking more about archives of weather history and what they tell us. During the early 19th century, the attempt to predict the monsoon in India was wrapped up with [colonial interests].”
The brass clusters used in the artwork are from toys found in secondhand markets in Karachi. There are 76 cast-brass tiles that make up maps of cities affected by the storms. Khan says General Zia-ul-Haq’s discriminatory politics led to the formation of the Women’s Action Forum (WAF) platform in 1981.
One of Khan’s favourite works in the exhibition is Zubeida Agha’s “playful” 1956 oil-on-canvas Karachi By Night, created in the same year as the constitution of Pakistan, under which the country became an Islamic Republic. “Artists in Pakistan have pushed against many political and social forms of censorship,” Khan says. “Art has been a resistance and a critique, a mirror of truth to the social order, and that has been one of the strengths of art produced in Pakistan.”
The exhibition also showcases works by architects such as Yasmeen Lari and Nayyar Ali Dada, exploring how they reflect Pakistan’s evolving identity. It emphasises sustainable design, responses to climate challenges, and the transformative role of the Aga Khan award for architecture, which debuted in Lahore in 1980, celebrating projects such as Lari’s community-focused designs and the Shigar Fort restoration.
There are three examples of flood-relief bamboo shelters in the museum courtyard, designed by Lari and the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan. There is also a focus on Zahoor ul Akhlaq, who – despite being widely recognised as one of the most influential Pakistani artists – has remained relatively under-researched until recently. In an essay for the museum catalogue, Mirza highlights Akhlaq as a pivotal figure who “connected the art of the present to the art of the past” by bridging historical practices, such as Mughal miniature painting and Islamic geometry, with postmodern sensibilities.
Mirza said he found his own artistic language after reading Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which he found in 1984 on a friend’s bookshelf. “I read it,” he says, “and then I thought, ‘Oh my God, what he did through literature, why can’t I do through my own work?’”
Mirza graduated from the National College of Arts in Lahore in 1986 before completing a master’s in painting at Royal College of Art, London, in 1991. He is particularly inspired by children’s drawings. The highlight of the show, in Mirza’s opinion, is a bronze sculpture by Huma Bhabha called The Orientalist, a powerful and thought-provoking piece featuring an ambiguous figure sitting on a chair, with a mix of human, alien, and totemic features.
“The sculpture is somehow disfigured and decayed and dehumanised,” says Mirza, “so everyone can read it through his or her lens. But for me, it is a kind of rotten or rotting authority, like Zia-ul-Haq.”
