Art Space

Events

Reading Room - AAN x Kurachee

18 December, 2023

We are pleased to present our first conversation for our publishing practices series at the Kurachee x AAN Reading Room

Exhausted Geographies: A Conversation between Abeera Kamran, Zahra Malkani and Shahana Rajani

Exhausted Geographies is a collaborative publishing practice by Shahana Rajani, Zahra Malkani and Abeera Kamran, based in Karachi, Pakistan. It is a series of publications exploring images, text and the city. Each volume of Exhausted Geographies mobilizes a crucial, cross-disciplinary political imaginary to rethink current representations of Karachi and includes a wide range of topics that provide new insights into the social, spatial and discursive fabric of the city.

Exhausted Geographies is now 10 years old. It remains an anchoring project amongst the various practices of its core team, Shahana Rajani, Zahra Malkani and Abeera Kamran. Exhausted Geographies has proven to be fertile ground for new imaginings and streams of inquiry for its team. Shahana, Zahra and Abeera will reflect upon how invigorating a self-published project can be within an art and design career. They will share insights into their collaborative and individual practices and concerns in an open and interactive discussion.

Beautiful Nightmares

November 16 - December 30, 2023

Where dreams and darkness intertwine,
A realm where fears and fantasies release,
Creating visions that are both divine.
Oh beautiful nightmares, enchanting sights,
Within the realm where shadows bloom,
Where stars ignite ethereal lights,
And moonbeams pierce the inky gloom.
Silent whispers echo through the night,
Unveiling secrets, untamed and wild,
Unleashing terrors, yet with pure delight,
For even in darkness, beauty is compiled.


-Marium Agha

The Lost River and the Rising Sea

September 21 - October 19, 2023

The Lost River and the Rising Sea

Preview on 21st September, 2023 
4:00-8.00 pm

Reading by Asma Mundrawala and Sadia Salim

Exhibition continues: 21st September to 19th October, 2023

Collection of documents, words, and visuals from the edge of Cholistan. 

“The work presented emerges from the aesthetic of neglect, loss, and decay - both personal and universal.  It questions our relationship to ‘place’ at a time of rapidly transitioning ecology, as we observe a continuous and aggressive occupation of the land under the garb of progress and prosperity. It includes material found in a village home as an archive, a repository of ideas and knowledge, some of it from a century ago”. - Artist Statement by Sadia Salim

The Table 01

25 March, 2023

The TAble 01

a project space / a gathering /a feast of sorts

Saturday 25th March 2023, 12 noon to 3 pm

AAN Art Space & Museum

In conjunction with the Reading Room by Kurachee

With provocations by Ahmer Naqvi, Sohail Abdullah, Vidha Saumya, Alana Hunt, Chris Kurian, Rajyashri Goody, Samyak Ghosh and Fazal Rizvi.

A project created by Fazal Rizvi

Reading Room

March 16 - April 20, 2023

Reading Room
AAN x Kurachee

A temporary reading room organized by AAN Art Space & Museum and Kurachee with collected and published art publications.

March 16th - April 20th 2023

From March 16 to April 7, AAN Art Space & Museum will be a free and accessible reading room featuring collected art publications to browse and buy. 

The publications include local art publications, zines, artist books, catalogues and more. 

Talks, workshops and discussions with Fazal Rizvi and Sophia Balagamwala to follow

If you would like to add your publication to the reading room for others to be able to see, please contact AAN Art Space & Museum.

Sweet Dreams

October 13 - December 16, 2022

Curatorial Note
‘Sweet Dreams’ (translated from English as میٹھے خواب) reveals the hopes of many a Pakistani immigrant living in the city of Oslo in Norway. Questioning dreams and their link to immigration, Kazmi is questioning what transpires when a person or a family move overseas and if their aspirations of building a new home in a foreign land are actually realised or remains an elusive quest.
 
‘Sweet Dreams’ is the first chapter of Kazmi’s long term research based project ‘The Abandoned Mansions of Pakistan’ that focuses on the Pakistani diaspora in Norway, specifically in the city of Oslo. Touching on diasporic hopes around immigration, memory, nostalgia, and consumption; the research project uses a combination of architectural drawings, performance, in situ installations and image-based works to explore immigrant cuisine as a basis for   communication, knowledge dissemination and production in daily lives of immigrant communities.

This exhibition is supported by Fund for Sound and Image, Norwegian Cultural Foundation, Office for Contemporary Art Norway and AAN Foundation.
 

In The Deep End

May 12 - June 11, 2022

The river is within us, the sea is all about us.

- T.S. Eliot

“The sea has many voices/ Many gods and many voices”, T.S. Eliot wrote. We first sense the world through the fluid inside our mother’s womb, we communicate with the world outside through this body of water. Once born we are really thrown into the deep end of the endless ocean we call ‘life’. Only to be consumed by it. Encountering, batting or embracing its demons and its gods. 

Oceans have held varying places in the imagination of societies, always linked to particular cultures and shifting in line with predominant world views and developing socio-economic and technological capacities. There are many ways of conceptualising the ocean, and different concepts exist concurrently, resulting in a multiplicity of perspectives that are changing over time. Water (such as the sea) thus, may become a metaphor for birth and rebirth, violence and death, self-discovery, spiritual journey, metamorphosis, change, inspiration and renewal. It becomes a language of our experience, a voice to our emotions. Its fluid nature allows it to be adaptive to each of our needs. Over and over again. Like the endless motion of the waves.

 - Malika Abbas

Chinese Whispers

March 24 - April 24, 2022

‘Now that the greatest knot of fury had been undone  [... ], finally his face has become serene and radiant, his eyes clearer than ever it was in the exercise of his past reasons. What does he say?’ He said: Leave me like this, I have come full circle and I understand. The world must be read upside down. Everything makes sense now.

“The Tale of Roland Crazed with Love”
-Italo Calvino

Notes From a Familiar Place

February 03 - March 10, 2022

This exhibition with these five young artists, attempts to register and document their associations and negotiations with space and place. Places that they inhabit, places that they walk and travel through, places that they investigate, excavate and dig into, places that they look at tenderly and care for, places of pain and also that of healing, places that are up-close and intimate, and others that are distant, places from their memory and places in their imaginary.

This is an exhibition in conversation with Fazal Rizvi

I AM, I AM NOT

28 December 2021 - 22 January 2022

Aisha Khalid’s retrospective entitled ‘I Am And I Am Not’ is intended to draw on her prominent artworks from 1994 to 2021, beginning with small-sized paintings, to full-scale installations, textile-based tapestries, video pieces, art books, and more towards her recent works.


As a notable woman artist, educationalist, agriculturist, and curator, Aisha Khalid has effortlessly advanced herself to become one of the most prominent artists of her day. Since the nineteen-nineties Khalid has played a key role in the art movement of contemporary neo-miniature painting, redefining miniature painting art in Pakistan and its reception worldwide. Creating dramatic conflations of pattern and geometry, which forms a field of inquiry that reflects the power dynamics, the North-South divide, as these are deeply concerned with the spiritual connections.
As the retrospective offers an opportunity to survey the multidisciplinary approach of Aisha Khalid as Pakistan’s most celebrated contemporary artist, engaged in the art that is purposeful and poignant. The art pieces reflect her deep sense of cogitation.

The Exhibition is curated by Masuma Halai Khwaja and organized by the Chawkandi Art Galley.
Sponsored by HBL. 

The Architecture of Being II

October 30 - November 13, 2021

The Architecture Of Being

September 16 - October 07, 2021

“Architecture is the learned game; correct and magnificent of forms assembled in the light”. - Le Corbusier.

Reexamine Retrace

June 10 - July 10, 2021

The rise of new media, viewed by some as a threat to the future of traditional printmaking, has led Studio R.M and Adeel uz Zafar to conceive a show, which renews the investigation of traditional methods and known classical techniques. With these intentions, they have invited those rising and established artists, whose imagery and technical application already employ traditional techniques, to then utilize traditional printmaking methodologies to create original artworks.

Microcosm 4

March 25 - April 25, 2021

A generational challenge has already been taken up and this idea has been explored in many major international projects in a global context. Youthfulness is a highly subjective topic and in the last years of boom, various artists came to the fore representing a new generation (young means under- 40). Based on the conviction that some of the most radical gestures in the art history have been carried out by the artists in early stages of their career, this curated exhibition, investigation or survey emphasizes the stars of tomorrow’s art scene who bring a myriad of visual culture influences in their art practice

 

Microcosm will bring insight into how this generation of artists experiencing and reinterpreting their attitude, identity, environment, tastes, sexualities and political learning through their artwork. This exhibition will offer a rich, intricate, multidisciplinary exploration of the work in a variety of media-ranging from drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, illustration, photography, video and few surprising mix.

Archival Memory

February 11 - March 11, 2021

This exhibition looks into the practices of artists as a means to record and archive ideas, emotions and experiences. The artist takes on the roles of the observer and the historian simultaneously. Their own experiences therefore define the editing of this particular archive.

Archives, as spaces of and catalysts for memory play a central role in society’s means of remembering.

In creating these archival documents artists are giving form to their own imagined realities. These ‘imagined realities’ may or may not have existed but are depicted in these visual narratives of grief, loss, joy and commemoration.

Paradise Lost

October 27 - December 08, 2020

“Paradise Lost” explores the onerous political, religious and social constructs that have re-shaped the fabric of Pakistan over the decades; yet, despite the weighty subject matter, Zafar manages to expertly weave into his work the limitless curiosity, capriciousness, and hope which has come to characterise his artistic endeavours. The works occupy seven distinct sections of the gallery space, with each compartment acting as a sanctum giving voice to a whispered national confession; which calls into question our festering apathy and silent acquiescence in the face of increasing hostility.

 

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