Written by: Sana Shahid
Posted on: May 02, 2025 | 
| 中文
Black and White by Ahsan Jamal
In a world moving faster than ever, the exhibition Encounters in Time reminds us to pause, reflect and remember. This show brings together artists from different generations and geographies, each presenting a unique relationship with time, memory and identity. Their works, whether painted, sung or stitched into being, serve as vessels carrying both personal and collective stories.
Hooria Khan creates artworks that feel like relics from a dream. Her piece Sahl-e-Mumtana uses a mix of gouache, foxed paper, flower printing, dried plants and even semi-precious stones like aqeeq. Mounted on handmade wasli paper, the work feels fragile yet deeply rooted. Khan discusses time as a presence, not something we pass through, but something we become. She references both Heidegger’s idea of “being” and Iqbal’s concept of Khudi, linking Western philosophy with South Asian thought in a quiet but powerful way. Looking at her work feels like reading a forgotten letter or touching an heirloom, sensing the weight of something deeply personal, yet universally felt.
Sahl-e-Mumtana by Hooria Khan
Fatima Kaleem offers an entirely different yet equally intimate experience. Her colored pencil drawings, such as The Veil and Unveiled, depict ghostly figures and symbolic objects like dental casts that quietly speak about identity, control and visibility. Her fascination with superstition and storytelling shows in the way her figures seem both present and hidden, drawing the viewer into the hidden space between fact and myth. Her work doesn’t shout, but it lingers. It invites you to look a second time and a third, making the cycle constant.
Unveiled by Fatima Kaleem
Sahyr Sayed, an artist and educator, continues the thread of the personal but pushes it further into the realm of the domestic. Her pieces, like Towels, Caresses & Promises, are made with mixed media and look like collages of a life lived. She talks about the “domestic hoard”, a concept that sees the home as not just a space of routine, but as an extension of the self, especially the female self. It’s not a concept that South Asians are not familiar with especially in the previous generations where females try to fulfill what is broken or absent in their lives through the act of hoarding. These works act as emotional time capsules, containing layers of tenderness, tension and play. There’s a sense of survival in them too, a quiet resilience found in the everyday.
Towels, Caresses & Promises by Sahyr Sayed
Ali Azmat, a seasoned painter whose long career reflects a deep engagement with both the external world and his internal landscape. His works, including River and Dialogue, use bold acrylic strokes layered over printed material. He treats painting as a way to respond to life’s many questions. For Azmat, art isn’t just a profession, it’s rather a means of reflection. “Through it, art and life become one,” he writes. His work encourages viewers to think not just about what they see, but how they feel when they see it. It’s meditative, without being overly serious, expressive, yet always thoughtful.
River by Ali Azmat
Natasha Malik, an artist working in Islamabad, bridges the historical with the contemporary in a rather unique manner. Malik deeply invested in present-day concerns, her pieces like The Garden of Grief and Contemplation are masterfully rendered using gouache, watercolor and gold leaf. They borrow visual cues from Mughal and Pahari painting styles, but the diverse themes cover grief, gender and memory. Malik’s works show how old techniques can tell new stories, and how history can become a lens through which we see our own lives more clearly.
Fatima Faisal Qureshi’s paintings feel like poetry turned into visuals. Her oil on canvas work, My Mother’s Daughter, is intimate and heavy with emotion with themes revolving around grief, identity and the unspoken tension that exists within family spaces. Qureshi’s use of light, space and body language in the compositions draws viewers into quiet emotional landscapes. There’s a softness in her style, but also a deep sense of unrest like the calm just before a storm of reflection. The artworks don’t ask for answers, they invite you to sit with the questions.
Murad Khan Mumtaz’s practice sits at the intersection of scholarly research and devotional art. His works reimagine portraits of saints and ascetics from Mughal, Deccani and Ottoman traditions. The paintings don’t feel historical in the dusty, museum-sense; they feel alive like a prayer or a quiet remembrance. Mumtaz’s pieces ask us to consider what we choose to remember and why. His paintings act as small acts of devotion, not only to saints but also to the act of remembering themselves.
Beyond the Image by Murad Khan Mumtaz
Perhaps one of the most surprising moments of the exhibition wasn’t a painting at all, but a live musical performance by Zainub J. Khawaja. A classically trained vocalist, Zainub sang at the exhibition opening, blending her deep knowledge of khayal, kafi and Gurbani with a modern sensibility. Her performance reminded everyone in the room that art is not only something we look at, but also something we hear and feel, also. As her voice filled the space, time itself seemed to bend. It was a rare and beautiful moment of collective stillness.
All these artists despite their different mediums, techniques and themes share something essential. They ask us to slow down in an age of endless scrolling and surface-level consumption, for these works encourage us to sit with our feelings, to look at the details, and to reflect on the stories we carry within us. Whether through delicate pattern work, layers of paint or gentle music, each artist reminds us that time is not always linear. Sometimes it loops, sometimes it waits and sometimes it reveals something we didn’t know we had lost.
In the Crisis of Love by Fatima Faisal Qureshi
Encounters in Time is more than an art exhibition, it’s an invitation to remember, to reconnect, and to reimagine how we see ourselves in the world and what roles do we rather take or encounter. These selected artists don’t just present their works, they offer pieces of themselves. In doing so, they give us permission to reflect on our own memories, our own time, and the moments that shape us.
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