‘Portrait of The Artist’ by Shahzia Sikander has been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Museums, Washington DC. This series is also being exhibited at the exhibition ‘I To Eye’ at the National Portrait Gallery. This series ‘Portrait of an Artist’ is also in the AAN Collection.
Google Cultural Institute Pakistan was launched in August 2015. The AAN Collection was honored and proud to be a partner of this launch in Pakistan. AAN Collection was a part of this launch along with the Lahore Museum, Mohatta Palace Museum, Walled City Authority Lahore, the Fakir Khana Museum.
Watch the video by clicking on the link above!
Shahzia Sikander’s video installation Parallax which was created and shown at The Sharjah Biennale in 2013 is being exhibited at the The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Shahzia Sikander
Parallax, 2013
Three-channel color animation with sound, 15 min and 30 sec Music by Du Yun
Music by Du Yun
© Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy of Sikander Studio
Works from the AAN Collection are part of Faiza Butt’s mid-career retrospective, Paracosm, at the Nottingham Art Exchange.
Video installation in the AAN collection, Lines and Confrontation by Saira Wasim, is being shown at the Iranian Pavilion ’s exhibition, The Great Game.
A survey of contemporary art from the Asia Pacific region, Time of Others features works of artists responding to social, historical and geopolitical concerns at this present juncture of living in a more interconnected world today, where notions of boundary, difference and Otherness have also become more complex.
Six Works from the AAN Collection by artists Imran Qureshi and Aisha Khalid were part of this especially curated inaugural show at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.
Created for pleasure, spiritual reflection, and aesthetic contemplation, gardens have held many meanings. Beyond their beauty, they represent the human impulse to organize, contain, and collect the natural world. Without cultivation a garden would cease to exist. Similarly, without cultivation of the mind and the soul, it is believed a society cannot progress. “To dwell is to garden,” wrote the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, reminding us of the central role of culture as part of our existence. The Garden of Ideas brings together the work of six internationally acclaimed Pakistani artists whose creations play with, question, and interrogate the timeless theme of the garden – Source: The Aga Khan Museum
Moderate Enlightenment, detailed portraits of friends and family in contemporary dress are set in sumptuously gilded landscapes, replete with the meticulous detail found in folios commissioned by the Mughal emperors. For Qureshi, there is an exquisite tension between the stringent parameters of this ancient practice and the modernity of his sitters—one that speaks, in part, to the frictions of a world in which novelty and orthodoxy collide.
Moderate Enlightenment, 2009
Goache & Gold Leaf on Hand Prepared Paper
11 X 8 Inches
A number of works from the AAN Collection were part of Rashid Rana’s mid-career retrospective, Labyrinth of Reflections at the Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi.
Designed on the lines of a labyrinth, the exhibit is spread on the ground and first floor of the palace and offers an interesting mix of pop culture references and socio-political commentary. Simply put, it will entice you and it will shock you.
A graduate of the National College of Arts, with a master’s degree from the Massachusetts College of Arts in Boston, Rana is currently heading the fine arts department at the Beaconhouse National University. A detailed note issued by the gallery for describing his work read: “His work poses questions about urban existence, identity, paradoxical truths and traces the changing facets and effects of globalization and also provides a gripping reminder that the images and stimulations that surround us in modern urban culture are deceptively different than what they may seem.” – Source : The Dawn
The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery showcases the power and breadth of new art from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh in its ground-breaking winter season all-gallery exhibition Sub-Topical Heat: New art from South Asia. Sub-Topical Heat is the most extensive and in-depth exhibition of art from South Asia presented to date in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The AAN Collection loaned the works of Imran Qureshi for this exhibition.
This artwork is a seminal artwork by Imran Qureshi and was among the Finalists of the Signature Art Prize 2011 at the Singapore Art Museum. These works were created before Imran Qureshi’s Courtyard Installation which won the Jury Prize at the Sharjah Biennial 2012.
Imran Qureshi
You Who Are My Love and My Life’s Enemy Too II, 2011
Goauche on Wasli, 94 X 48 Inches X 3 Triptych
Desperately Seeking Paradise, a seminal work by Rashid Rana which is in the AAN Collection was shown in Viewing Points and View Points was featured at the Asian Art Biennial in Taiching, Taiwan.
Works from the AAN Collection by artists Naiza Khan and Mehreen Zuberi were part of this especially curated show at the Asia Society Museum, New York.
Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan brings to New York some of Pakistan’s most significant, provocative, and influential artists in the first U.S. museum survey exhibition of contemporary Pakistani art. Although Pakistan frequently makes the headlines for very different reasons, its rich cultural heritage and vibrant contemporary art scene often go unnoticed. Pakistani civil society has a history of dissent and activism, which has often informed its art movements, its poetry, and its music. – Source: The Asia Society Museum, New York
The Department of Fine Arts and the University Museum and Art Gallery of The University of Hong Kong are delighted to present an exhibition entitled Outside In: alternative narratives in contemporary art from 9 June to 19 July 2009. Organized in conjunction with the conference titled Rethinking Visual Narratives from Asia: Intercultural and Comparative Perspectives, the exhibition presents the work of six young artists to show the narrative potential of contemporary art today.
The Lahore-based artists Aisha Khalid and Imran Qureshi were both trained in the ancient art of Mughal miniatures but have transformed it from an illustrative art form into an expressive one. Khalid subverts the miniature format to create works featuring optical effects, while Qureshi's delicate brushwork and gold embellished abstract paintings have echoes of their earlier precedents
Moderate Enlightenment by Imran Qureshi was exhibited at the 53rd Venice Biennial in June 2009 in a collateral event the East West Divan.