This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of the same title, held at the Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi, from 29 October 2010 – 28 February 2011. The first contemporary art exhibition of its kind to take place at the Museum, it endeavours to depict the tremendous developments that have shaped Pakistani art practice over the last two decades, with particular emphasis on the transformation of the city, under the backdrop of recent social, cultural, economic and political upheavals that have taken place in the country.

'A confluence of modernity and tradition, the everyday and the heroic, the miniature and the immense, the city within Pakistan is a rich and fertile space for artistic interrogation of place, temporality, belonging and violation. Conceptualizations of urbanity are significant for understanding how space is realized and re-worked by artists. The articulations that artists make between their work and the spaces they envision and inhabit become a means for us to readdress urban space...Urbanity also functions as a metaphor for the confluence and exchange between the artist and the space through which he or she travels.

The Rising Tide looks at how languages of belonging and displacement are mobilized, anchored and sustained between layers of urban everyday life and contemporary artists' studio practices.' - excerpt from front flap

Artists' and contributors' biographies included.