The Rising Tide: New Directions in Art from Pakistan

Naiza H Khan, visual artist and researcher based in Karachi, will present a talk at AAA, focusing on selected artistic production/processes which offer a cultural and critical evaluation of developments in contemporary art practice in Pakistan today.


Khan’s talk is based on an exhibition of the same name she curated earlier this year at the Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi. 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. Contemporary artists map the dislocations of history and track newer dilemmas created by a globalised world saturated with media and popular culture. The presentation will focus on conceptualisations of urbanity which are significant in examining relations of identity and place. Social and aesthetic issues have forged a new set of conditions within which artists function in Pakistan; we question how we experience art today and what it means for artists to make work at this point in our history.


Naiza H Khan is a visual artist based in Karachi. Her artistic practice centers on observations of gender and its political manifestations, expressed through a variety of media including sculpture, photography, painting, and printmaking. A central figure in Karachi's contemporary art scene, Khan is a founding member and former coordinator for the Vasl Artists’ Collective, and has been part of the Fine Arts Faculty at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Her curatorial projects include ‘Holding the line’, part of the inaugural exhibitions held at the National Art Gallery, Islamabad, 2007. Khan has been selected for the Pakistan Lecture Series by the American Institute for Pakistan Studies for 2011.

Her work has received numerous awards, including the inaugural Unilever Lux Award for Visual Artist of the Year in 2002, the National Excellence Award PNCA in 2003, and the 43rd Premio Suzzarra (Italy) in 2003, and has been shown in international exhibitions. She holds a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Somerville College, Oxford.

Relevant content

The Rising Tide: New Directions in Art from Pakistan 1990-2010
The Rising Tide: New Directions in Art from Pakistan 1990-2010
Exhibition Catalogue

The Rising Tide: New Directions in Art from Pakistan 1990-2010

Arif HASAN, Durriya KAZI, Hammad NASAR, Mohammad HANIF, Naiza H. KHAN, Quddus MIRZA, Salima HASHMI
2010