Qatar Museums presents first exhibition to chronicle modern, contemporary visual arts and architecture from Pakistan
The Peninsula
Doha, Qatar: This November, Qatar Museums will open a first of its kind exhibition exploring the arts and architecture from Pakistan since the 1940s....
Doha, Qatar: This November, Qatar Museums will open a first-of-its-kind exhibition exploring the arts and architecture from Pakistan since the 1940s.
MANZAR: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today (November 1, 2024– January 31, 2025) brings together more than 200 artworks—including paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, tapestries and miniatures, plus commissioned works by artists and architects currently living and working in Pakistan and its diasporas—to present various views of the country’s artistic and architectural movements.
Organised by the future Art Mill Museum and presented in collaboration with the National Museum of Qatar, which will host the exhibition, MANZAR presents the enormously diverse output of the painters, photographers, architects and others who have defined the array of narratives, histories, and contemporary perspectives of Pakistan’s cultures over the past eighty years. The artworks, programmes and events extend from the gallery spaces to the courtyard of the Palace of Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani for a broad immersion in Pakistani art and architecture.
The ground-breaking exhibition, designed by renowned architect Raza Ali Dada and unfolding across twelve sections, will reveal how artists responded to and reimagined international modernist movements.
MANZAR brings to light lesser-known global art histories and demonstrates how they weave into broader social and cultural trends. Through themed galleries dedicated to aesthetic experiments and calligraphy, nation-building, regionalism, neo-miniature, the urban vernacular, and the politics of land and water, among others, the exhibition presents a perspective on arts from Pakistan through unprecedented loans from public institutions such as the Alhamra Art Museum in Lahore and Pakistan National Council of the Arts in Islamabad; loans from private collections across Pakistan and in Dubai, London and New York; as well as works from Qatar Museums collections.
