At the Circle’s Center—comprised of small works on paper, large-scale paintings, embroidered and pinned textiles, mixed media photo works, and video covers the breadth of Aisha Khalid’s practice rooted in neo-miniature techniques and discipline. Her work has evolved outside the boundaries of traditional Mughal miniatures to play with size and explore the power dynamics of global politics while maintaining a connection to the spiritual realm.
The title of this exhibition is pulled from a striking diptych painted in rich shades of green, red, and blue. The work exemplifies the ritualistic process of the artist in which she repetitively paints geometric forms inspired by the floor tiles in her childhood home in Sindh. These vortex compositions come together without the aid of preliminary sketches. Having removed the traditional borders of miniature paintings from her works in the early 2000s, Khalid’s new paintings feature undulating surfaces that appear to be without beginning or end. An endless depth is hinted at through circular interruptions in the pattern and through the use of wasli (a hand-layered paper ground) as material. The center of the titular circle slips in and out of focus, symbolizing the loss of a determinable and grounding center in our socio-political climate.
The strict ornament of Khalid’s compositions is a more recent development. Her early works often featured the female form lovingly draped in a veil or burqa. As the artist’s relationship with the dichotomies of East and West changed with paradigm-shifting world events, the figure departed, leaving behind only a trace via rippling hemlines. This line became circular around 2008 as it transformed into a stylized bullet hole. Over the past few years, it has taken on further signification as a virus cell.
Khalid’s art grapples with the lasting legacies of colonialism and violence through deceptively simple geometric forms as well as through the more readily apparent use of pins and needles. By not only piercing the surface of her textiles but leaving behind the penetrating objects, the artist mutates the healing metaphor of the stitch into something more sinister. And yet, like the repetitive mystical quality that balances the undercurrent of violence in her paintings, the golden fields of pins in her textiles, as seen on the verso of 2023’s Be Like a Tree and Let the Dead Leaves Drop, have dual meanings. For Khalid, this jagged surface is a visual link to her renewed interest in farming and the ripening wheat she tends in her Charbagh (four garden design) fields. This softer side is seen in her video I Am and I Am Not – Frere Hall (2021), showing the artist surrounded by golden wheat, filmed using a drone during the pandemic, to a soundtrack of her voice singing Huu (sufi chanting).
The healing element of Khalid’s practice is most evident in her multi-media works that combine photography and painting. In More Beautiful for Having Been Broken (2018), Khalid moved a site-specific installation at the Shahi Hammam in Lahore into a cropped, two-dimensional work. Unable to paint directly in the gaps of the damaged frescoes in the 17th-century bathhouse, Khalid intervenes in archival prints, painting in her signature geometric patterns. These photo-based works highlight the ways in which neo-miniature art not only preserves Islamic art traditions but also serves to embody contemporary themes of memory, identity, and culture.
Comforters, 2023
The bullet holes in Khalid’s vortex paintings first appeared in 2008 at an exhibition in Kabul, Afghanistan. Titled Viewpoint, the site-specific work at the Queen’s Palace, Bagh-e-Babar drew inspiration from the bullet holeridden exteriors of the surrounding community by bringing the damage inside. The artist painted puddles of her red vortex geometries on the floor and smaller vortices dotting the walls, encouraging visitors to grapple with the ongoing history of violence in their region. The work was restaged as Face It at the Venice Biennale the following year. In Venice, the bullet hole vortices were painted on mirrors, directly confronting the visitors of the Western world’s most illustrious art event by placing the wounds directly on their reflected bodies.
The four-fold ripples of Khalid’s bullet holes are derived from the hemline of burqas, which featured frequently in her earlier paintings. As representations of the body slowly disappeared from Khalid’s work, the hemline remained a symbol of what cannot be seen, eventually transforming into the circular shape in her paintings today. In a world grappling with the repercussions of a global pandemic, the shape has taken on the additional symbolism of a virus cell.
More Beautiful for Having Been Broken is a series that came out of the inaugural Lahore Biennial in 2018. Khalid was tasked with creating a sitespecific installation for the Shahi Hammam (Royal Baths of Lahore), which had recently received an Award of Merit from the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation. Running nearby was the newly minted Orange Line, a mass-transit system desperately needed to fulfill the needs of the highly populated center of Lahore. The original idea was to integrate Khalid’s own neo-miniature style painting with the 17th-century miniature-inspired frescoes of the baths’ interior. For the artist, this would have been the perfect melding of the traditional with the contemporary - a dichotomy that defines her very art practice. When unable to get permission to create this in situ work, Khalid pivoted and instead installed a mirror on the floor intersected by bands of orange referencing the new metro that now shared the skyline with Lahore’s old town. As a compromise, Khalid took high-resolution photos of the domed fresco of the Shahi Hammam and integrated her geometric vortex paintings and Japanese kintsugi-inspired gold leaf into the damaged spaces as two-dimensional artworks.
In his day the French performance artist Marcel Marceau saw the fantastic manipulation of the visible for the invisible, and vice-versa, as the actions of a magician and mime, with his audiences revelling in his theatre of darkness. That feeling for the fanciful, the idea that beyond the walls and window of our reality is something of the other, is where artist Aisha Khalid conjures her own extraordinary apparitions, as she leads one into these voids of visual design, where the real appears removed, often entirely, from a past that no longer exists. On stage Marceau’s painted face and signature stand-up included attempting to free himself of an enclosing room, and pulling at a never-ending rope, to take the spectator on a journey into the unknown. The fabricating of the truth, referencing and resetting reality at the same time, is mastered as much by Khalid, who has for some years now taken miniature painting into the modern world, with images and ideas that are entirely of the moment. German painter Max Beckmann explained it as “seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible into the invisible through reality,” and as much in Khalid’s work the real is relinquished of its longstanding responsibilities, to appear as just another element, no more and less important, than the fantastical that fills the picture plane.
Meaningful in Karachi, and again here in New York, Khalid’s I Am and I Am Not drawings are her exercise-book illusions, as she takes the minimal of materials to move visual mountains, with emblems that enter an imagined space, that she explains as born of her ‘conscious and unconscious mind.’ Like Marceau, wanting as she says, to create “a stagelike space, in which the characters are performing within a place that is without a door, or window. So not a conventional space in the sense that we might understand it, more something self-contained.” Fictional places that for their obvious and equally obscure imagery are imbued with a similar significance to the walls of a house, that for the years we live in it, is slowly and softly damaged by the scuff marks that become its unedifying yet remarkable history. A record of time that for her is autobiographical, geographical, miniature and minimal, as she has used painting as the point of departure for much of her more ambitious works.
Like puzzles that insist on being solved, Khalid’s drawings are made-up of her magical imagination that illuminates her pages like divine visions. Embryos, atoms, numberless dice and decorated daggers are all engaged as the symbols of her sensations. Spears propelled across pages as if behind the heavy curtains, there is a war of attrition taking place. Pushing free or applied to the incomplete ladder of lines, the artist carefully and very cleverly insisted on these rudimentary markers, recalling her schooling, and the source for the greater ambition of her work, in the form of photography and material fabrics.
Khalid saw in her postcard-sized images an opportunity to understand what space and perspective would offer her work. Which would lead to her pulling at the trim of her imaginary fabrics from her paintings, to have their physical manifestations hang from the ceiling, and pinned to the floor. The miniature would transform into the monumental, and
Khalid’s original representations of the material and bodily would become sculptural and even environmental, as with her aerial photographs (notable in the video I Am and I Am Not – Frere Hall 2021, Aisha appearing as a miniature figure dressed in black in a field of gold wheat), and the series More Beautiful for Having Been Broken
In an attempt to explore absence as an involving presence, the artist affirms the idea that space creates its own space, and that the removal of the figure only emphasises a longing for their return. As with the loss of someone, of their sudden and unexpected leaving from our lives, for a time we feel their former existence more intensely, and that yearning for what is no longer there is visually explored in a series, I Am and I Am Not 2023, of which several appear in the exhibition. One has the regal remains of a man — warrior, worshiper, whose combination of dagger, sword and slippers remaining attached to the bodily space where he would have once stood, full length and central to this exquisite scene (page 72). That Khalid explains, as the removal and reintroduction of the human spirit, “I always intend through various forms of symbolism to introduce the human element back into my work.”
The recurring symbols, the need to return to imagery again and again, as if unimaginable episodes of time passes between works, draws attention to the curtain, the cube, and the comfort of her patterned designs, which take one in the direction of Belgian artist Rene Magritte, who playfully restaged the real in his paintings, and saw ‘that which is hidden by what we see,’ citing how, “that interest” of the evident and the unknown “can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, between the visible that is hidden, and the visible that is present.” It is that conflict of interests, of the same kind of Nicht Repräsentierbar or the unrepresentable, as coined by French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that Khalid has long since created her own. Magritte goes further to discuss how everything of the real appears camouflaged, or “surrounded by curtains.” How “we only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered to be recognised at all,” which Khalid addresses equally, when exploring the significance of her own cyphers, saying “when I started to make something beyond the miniature, and if you look closely at the early paintings, you will notice aspects of textiles, with my painting the veil and curtain, motifs, together with floral and geometric patterns. So later when you come to see the curtain as a physical material in space, compared to that in a miniature painting, you can, as you suggest, relate those original images, with the material works that you see on a much larger scale.” Khalid’s enterprise is in seeing, by abstract and figurative means, the world that we are in, as equal and opposite to a world we are without.
Rajesh Punj is an art critic, correspondent, and collector, with an academic background in European and American Art History from Warick University (UK) and Curating from Goldsmiths (UK). His interview with Aisha Khalid appeared in the catalogue for her 2021-2023 retrospective, I AM and I AM NOT.
Khalid’s art grapples with the lasting legacies of colonialism and violence through deceptively simple geometric forms, one of the most subtle being the lines drawn on her small wasli works. Easily mistaken for readymade writing paper found in office supply stores, these lines are hand drawn by the artist. The intentional reference to writing paper highlights the ubiquity of the English language and how even the style of paper used for writing other languages, like Urdu, has been overtaken by English language imperialism.
Aisha Khalid (b. 1972, Faisalabad) was trained in the Indo-Persian miniature traditions at the National College of Arts Lahore (1997) and completed post-graduate studies at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2001-2002). She has participated in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester, Corvi-Mora Gallery, Asia House, Aga Khan Museum Toronto, SMK National Gallery of Denmark, The Royal Academy, and the Modern Art Museum Arnhem. Khalid participated in the Fukuoka Triennale (2001), Bagh-e-Babur Kabul (2008), Moscow Biennial (2013), Lahore Biennial (2018), and APT Asia Pacific Triennial (2018).
One of Pakistan’s leading contemporary artists, Khalid’s diverse practice and contribution to the neo-miniature movement was celebrated with I Am and I Am Not, a retrospective spanning three decades of her career, travelling from Karachi to New Zealand between 2021 and 2023. Her works have featured in the Venice (2009) and Sharjah (2011) Biennials, and she received the Jameel Prize’s people’s choice award in 2011. Her monumental painting and tapestry installations are on permanent view at the Islamabad International Airport and the Aga Khan Museum Toronto.
2001 – 2002 Post-Graduation, Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, Netherlands
1997 BFA, National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan
2023 At the Circle’s Center, Aicon, New York, USA
I AM and I AM NOT, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand
2021-2022 I AM and I AM NOT, Chawkandi Art Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan
2019 India Art Fair, New Delhi, India
2018 Art Basel, Hong Kong
2017 I AM and I AM NOT, Gallery Zilberman, Berlin, Germany
2016 Two worlds as one, National Art Gallery/ Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark
2014
When I am Silent, Pao Galleries, Hong Kong Art Center, Hong Kong
2013 The Divine is in the Detail, IVDE Gallery, Dubai, UAE
2012 Larger Than Life, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK
Larger than life, Corvi-Mora Gallery, London, UK
2010 Pattern to Follow, Chawkandi Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan
Pattern to Follow, Pao Galleries, Hong Kong Art Center, Hong Kong
Name Class Subject, Artist Book launch at Free Words London, UK
2008 Conversations, Pump House Gallery, London, UK
2007 Portraits & Vortexes, Gandhara-Art, Hong Kong Art Center, Hong Kong
Corvi-Mora Gallery, London, UK
2006 Anant Gallery, New Delhi, India
2004 Corvi-Mora Gallery, London, UK
2003 Rohtas ll Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
Conversation, Canvas Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan
2001 Admit One Gallery, New York, USA
2000 Sim Sim Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
Rohtas Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan
2021 Seeing & Perceiving, King Abulaziz Center, Ithra, Saudia Arabia
2019 Al Burda Endowment, Abu Dhabi Art Fair, Manarat Al Saadiyat
2017 Interwoven Dialogues, Contemporary Art from Africa & South Asia, Aicon, New York, USA
Two wings to fly, not one, National Art Gallery PNCA, Islamabad, Pakistan
2016 Other states other lives other souls, Corvi-Mora, London, UK
Red Gaze, Gallery Zilberman, Berlin, Germany
2015 Nature Morte, New Delhi, India (with Imran Qureshi)
Minor Heroisms, Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey
2014 Garden of Ideas, Aga Khan Museum Toronto, Canada
Threads. Textile in Art & Design, Modern Art Museum Arnhem, The Netherlands
2013 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art
Jameel Prize Finalist Artist Exhibition, San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas, USA
The Weight of History, Collectors Show, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore
Jameel Prize Finalist Artist Exhibition, Cantor Arts Centre, Stanford University, USA
2012 Women In-Between: Asian Women Artists 1984-2012, Fukuoka Museum, Japan
Jameel Prize Finalist Artist Exhibition, Casa Arabe, Madrid, Spain
2011 10th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, UAE
Jameel Prize Finalist Artist’s Exhibition, Jameel Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK
Political Patterns, IFA Gallery, Berlin, Germany
V&A Museum, London Political Patterns’ IFA Gallery, Berlin, Germany
Light, Passion and Darkness, Touchstones, Rochdale, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Blackburn, UK
Jameel Prize Finalist Artist exhibition, The Institute du Monde Arabe, Paris, France
2010 The Rising Tide, Mohata Palace Museum, Karachi, Pakistan
Light, Passion and Darkness, Gallery Oldham, Oldham, UK
Beyond The Page, Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, USA
The Caged Bird Sings, Zahoor-ul-Akhlaq Gallery, NCA Lahore, Pakistan
Corvi-Mora Gallery London, UK (with Imran Qureshi)
2009 Venice Biennial, ‘East West Diwan’ Contemporary Art from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, Venice, Italy
Outside In: Alternative Narratives in Contemporary Art, University Museum & Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Art HK 09, The Hong Kong International Art Fair, Hong Kong
The Power of Ornament, Belvedere, Vienna, Austria
Living Traditions, National Art Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan
2008
Art HK 08, The Hong Kong International Art Fair, Hong Kong
Living Traditions, Queen’s Palace Bag-e-Babar, Kabul, Afghanistan
2007 Friends of Rohtas, Rohtas Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
Moving Ahead, National Art Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan
2006
Frieze Art Fair, London, UK
Beyond the Page, Asia House, London, UK; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK
2005 Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield CT, USA
Chawkandhi Art Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan
Re-Inventing Narratives, Gallery Al-Fasih, Rabat, Morocco
One to One, Alhamra Art Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
Chawkandi Art Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan (with Imran Qureshi)
2004 Ritu, Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi, India
Cover Girl, Ise Cultural Foundation Gallery, New York, USA
Along the X Axis, Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi, India
2003 Karkhana, Rochdale Art Gallery, Rochdale, UK.
Miniature Pakistanaises, Maison Art Contemporain Challious-94 Frenses, France
Negotiating Borders, Siddhartha Art Gallery, Kathmandu, Nepal
2002 Open Ateliers, Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Galleries Show, Royal Academy, London
Threads, Dreams, Desires, Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston, UK
2nd Asian Art Triennial in Fukuoka Museum, Japan
2001
Maneuvering Miniatures, 11C Gallery, New Delhi & Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai Open Ateliers Rijksakademie, Amsterdam Netherlands
Deutsche Bank, New York, USA
IVAN Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, Australia
Corvi-Mora Gallery, London, UK (with Imran Qureshi)
2000 Tao Gallery, Mumbai, India
Pakistan Another Vision, Brunei Gallery, London, UK
Huddersfield Art Gallery, Huddersfield, UK
Center of Contemporary Art Glasgow, UK
Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, UK
Didrichsen art Museum, Kuusisaari, Finland
Canvas Art Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan
1999 American Club, Islamabad
Scope-8 Gallery National College of Arts, Lahore
Chawkandi Art Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan (with Imran Qureshi)
1997 Alliance Française, Lahore, Pakistan
Miniature Paintings Exhibition, Lahore Museum, Lahore, Pakistan
Chawkandi Art Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan
Miniature Paintings Exhibition, Lahore Museum, Pakistan
National Exhibition of Paintings, AL-Hamra Art Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
Panjab Artist Association, AL-Hamra Art Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
1995 Panjab Artist Association, AL-Hamra Art Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan
1994 Shakir Ali Museum, Lahore, Pakistan
2018 You are the universe in ecstatic motion, 12 x 192 foot mural at Islamabad international Airport at the international departures lounge
2019 Al Burda Endowment, Ministry of Culture and Knowledge Development, UAE, page 78
2018 APT-9, the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland, Australia, QAGOMA, page 93
2017 Two wings to fly not one, book, National Art Gallery Islamabad, Pakistan
I am and I am not, exhibition catalogue, IVDE Gallery Dubai, UAE
2016 Domestic Affairs, exhibition catalogue, IVDE Gallery Dubai, UAE
2015 Asia Collection 100, From the Collection of Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan, page 99
2014 Threads, Museum Arnhem, Netherlands, page 35
2013 More Light, Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art 2013, Moscow, Russia, page 349
Devine is in the Detail, (Catalogue) IVDE Gallery, Dubai, UAE
2012 Larger than Life, Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, UK
Journal of Contemporary Arts and Culture, National College of Arts & One nine two, Lahore, Pakistan, pages 44-76
2011 Plot for a Biennale: Sharjah Biennial 10, March 16-May 16 2011, exhibition
catalogue, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE, pages 147-152
2010 Pattern to Follow, Gandhara Art Hong Kong, Hong Kong
2009 Living Traditions, Jemima Montagu and Constance Wyndham, Turquoise Mountain, Kabul, Afghanistan, pages 85-95
Die Macht Des Ornaments, Belvedere, Vienna, pages 77-82
Outside In, Alternative Narratives in Contemporary Art, University Museum and Art Gallery, University of Hong Kong, HK
2008 Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery, Koenig Books, December, page 202
2007 Portrait & Vortexes, Gandhara Art, Hong Kong
Il Velo, Centro Sperimentale per le Arti Contemporanee, Silvana Editoriale, Milan, Italy, page 131
Portraits and Vortexes, Rohtas 2 and Gandhara Art, Hong Kong
2006 Tales Carried by the Breath, Nancy Adajania, Anant Art Gallery, New Delhi
2004 Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration, Hammad Nassar, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, pages 8-11
2002 Imagined Workshop, The Second Fukuoka Triennial 2002, pages 8-11
Art Tomorrow, Edward Lucie-Smith, Terrail
Aisha Khalid 2001-2002, Lahore, Pakistan
1998 Lahore Colours, Lahore Arts Council, Lahore, Pakistan
2012 Winner (category Artist Book), Alice Awards, Artistic landmarks in contemporary experience
2011 People’s Choice winner of Jameel Prize
2011 Finalist Artist of Jameel Prize
2010 Birgit Skiold Memorial Trust Award of Excellence, London Artists Book Fair
Aga Khan Museum of Arts, New Delhi, India
AAN Foundation, Hong Kong
Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi, India
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan
Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Harris Museum, Preston, UK
M+ Museum, Hong Kong
King Abdul Aziz Center for World Culture, Ithra, Saudi Arabia
Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts, New Delhi, India
Qatar Museums, Qatar
Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Queensland, Australia
Sharjah Arm Museum, Sharjah, UAE
Sheikh Zaid Museum, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK
World Bank, Washington, USA
All works by the artist ©Aisha Khalid Installation photography by Sebastian Bach Catalogue Essay by Rajesh Punj
