Roshani explores the dynamic dialogue between contemporary artistic practice and the longstanding tradition of miniature painting in Pakistan, tracing the shifting aesthetics, visual languages, and conceptual frameworks of South Asian art.
Presented collectively, the artworks reveal each artist’s distinct influences, environments, and narratives, while offering insight into the broader transformations shaping contemporary Pakistani painting.
Rooted in a form historically associated with precision, intimacy, and narrative detail, miniature painting is re-examined here through a contemporary lens, revealing how its techniques and iconography continue to inform, resist, and evolve within present-day practice.
Through a wide range of materials, scales, and approaches, the works in Roshani reflect changing relationships between tradition and modernity, addressing how artists negotiate inherited forms while responding to social, cultural, and political realities of the present. Rather than positioning tradition and contemporary practice as opposing forces, the exhibition foregrounds their interdependence, highlighting moments of continuity, rupture, and reinvention.
Collectively, the works trace an expanded visual field in which historical reference and experimentation coexist, offering new perspectives on cultural memory, identity, and the evolving nature of South Asian visual culture.
Featuring Zafar Ali, Ajea Zahid, Farishta Mirza and Feroza Hakeem.