istory, like a work of art, is not natural and neutral, but constructed. When it comes to the history of art, it entails agendas, biases and preferences. It is especially so with the genres like miniature painting (traditional as well as the modern-day version).

The practitioners, instructors and collectors have various views about this past and the form in which it was revived in the last decade of the Twentieth-Century Lahore. Early graduates of miniature painting from the National College of Arts Lahore (Shahzia Sikander, Imran Qureshi, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Aisha Khalid, Talha Rathore, Tazeen Qayyum, Saira Wasim, Hasnat Mehmood, Waseem Ahmed, Muhammad Zeeshan and Khadim Ali, among others) are creating work in which the training of miniature painting serves as a seed or stepping board to produce video projections, site-specific installations, digital prints, sculptures, oil paintings, photographs and mixed media pieces.

The exhibition, Beyond the Page, curated by Hammad Nasar and Anthony Spira with advice from Emily Hannam at the MK Gallery Milton Keynes, UK, is an attempt to rewrite the history of this art from a broader and more inclusive perspective. With examples of manuscripts, paintings and calligraphies from 1600 to Later Mughal and Company Periods along with “work by artists from different generations working in dialogue with the miniature tradition, including Hamra Abbas, David Alesworth, Nandalal Bose, Noor Ali Chagani, Lubna Chowdhary, Adbur Rahman Chughtai, Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin, NS Harsha, Howard Hodgkin, Ali Kazim, Bhupen Khakhar, Jess MacNeil, Imran Qureshi, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Mohan Samant, Nilima Sheikh, Willem Schellinks, the Singh Twins, Shahzia Sikander and Abanindranath Tagore.”

Between the year 2023 and 1600, there are more than four hundred years. Yet the two curators did not opt for a survey show. Instead it is an extensive, intense and investigative essay on an art form that has been represented, misrepresented, appropriated, exoticised and exploited in its homeland and across the globe.

An exhibition of its scale and scope aims to make us view historic familiar, and famous work through an unexpected lens. Beyond the Page (October 7-January 28) presents the art of the past and present with a change of context. There is no romanticising of the past and no glorification of the tradition. Instead it offers a basic interpretation that there may be gaps in history, often disconnected or distant, but in its essence there is hardly a difference between the work produced in 1640 (for instance The Delivery of Presents for Prince Dara Shikoh’s Wedding in December 1632) or made in 1990 (like the Untitled 2, by Zahoor-ul Akhlaq), or for that matter created in 2004 (All Rights Reserved, by Hamra Abbas). The miniature from 1640 is a page from Padshahnama, which documents a range of gifts brought to the court, but the genius of the painter has elevated a piece of information to a visual still enjoyed due to its formal qualities: arrangement of horses and riders, courtiers carrying trays on their heads in another linear formation, with a middle space of grey occasionally interrupted by one or two characters. The composition of numerous elements and the spatial divide emphasise its aesthetic (read abstract) nature. It is also visible in Akhlaq’s canvas, with a lone rider rendered in sweeping and spontaneous brush strokes; as well as in the digital print of Abbas, as she separates segments of the original work to enhance its formal aspects.

Likewise, in another part of the show, the figure of Jahangir Hawking (c.1605-1627) by an unknown artist is displayed near Rashid Rana’s digital print I Love Miniatures (2002). Both consist of the emperors’ portrait in profile, but if the earlier painting represented the might of the great Mughal, Rana’s work comments on the notion of tradition in a post-colonial/ post-modern society.

Drawing on these and other links, the exhibition weaves a narrative, expounded through several sections of the display. The first of these, The Court and the Courtyard, focuses on the construction of a conceptual and complex, rather than an optical, space. Another area, called Roots and Rituals offers a sense of belonging, both to the land and its pictorial expressions, including text, myths, human activities and celebrations etc. The section also delineates contacts between South Asia and Europe. Colonial encounters in the form of European artists reproducing Indian miniatures, like Renold Elstrack’s engraving of Shahjehan’s portrait (c.1616-1621), or the other way around, for instance the picture of EB Havell, painted by Ishwari Lal (c.1904), in which the Indian painter blended the practice of Mughal painting and European naturalism. Or Howard Hodgkin’s two oil paintings (Tea with Mrs Parekh, 1974-77, and Kerala, 1992) which confirm the British artist’s long-standing inquiry into the Indian miniature painting, along with Alan Davie’s Mystical Landscape No 2 Jain (1986), a canvas based upon Tantric and Jain diagrams numbers and an indigenous colour scheme.

The theme of interaction, exchange, and invasion of ideas, resources and information continues in the third section/ space of the exhibition People, Power & Politics. Although one spots the same cross-cultural conversation as found in the second gallery, here power plays a crucial role. Visible in the work of Nusra Latif Qureshi, who is reconstructing the past in a unique manner: by combining figures from the Mughal painting with colonial conquerors and their exploration of a native land and its flora and fauna – hence its history and art. Qureshi has been living in Australia (away from her homeland) a shift that perhaps made her realise how multiple sources forge a human in this age of globalisation. Illustrated in her digital print on transparent film in the form of a scroll; the series of portraits (Did You Come Here to Find History? 2009) unfolds layers of numerous personae of the artist. A testimony of our diverse identities in a global Google Earth.

You walk across the exhibition and you come across how artists from South Asia have responded to the theme of identity, especially in the current times. Ali Kazim, in a group of 16 portraits depicts young adults from the subcontinent with their religious marks, i.e. a headscarf, bindi, cross, chador, tilak, green turban, saffron robe, crocheted cap and Jewish head dress, reaffirming the coexistence of faiths in an ancient land. Hamra Abbas reminds us of the diversity of social roles, positions and practices, by painting – in a meticulous technique the faces of “Lahore’s transgender community during their daily street performances.”

The display at the MK Gallery addresses the nature, relevance, impact and power of long-exhausted modern miniatures from South Asia, besides reinventing the history and its various incarnations, some even not tied to its formal lineage - like the incredible work of Arpita Singh, Bhupen Khakar, NS Harsha, Lubna Chowdhry and Mohan Samant. The former’s mixed media canvases are an elaboration on the idea of space, two-dimensionality and phantasmagoria. His paintings, a theatre of the absurd, present the contemporary reality of South Asia.

The most exciting and exalting part of the exhibition is the way history and contemporary times are interlaced. Some of the work from the past included in the last section: The Order of Things (a caption borrowed from Michel Foucault’s book) captivate a viewer, especially the way history travels across the trodden and clogged paths of Indian pictorial terrain. The highlight of the last room, the finale of the show, are two clinically rendered works on paper. In Cheetah from Seringapatam, c.1800-1805, the taut body of the feline - with its coat, spots and hair - still appears alert, even though it perished two and a quarter centuries ago. Likewise, a pencil and watercolour drawing by Bhawani Das of Banded Krait (1782), portrays the reptile with rings on its body, and its turns, vitality, force and delicacy that convey a subliminal poetry. The lyricism in that, otherwise objective description is complemented by Ali Kazim’s Untitled 2023, the installation of human hair, hairspray and invisible thread that echoes the shape of a coiled snake.

The most significant feature of the exhibition, Beyond the Page, is that it takes you beyond the segregation of the past and the present, tradition and modernity, indigenousness and imported, because when a viewer, especially from South Asia walks across these rooms, he/ she discovers connections across time and regions; and realises that the exhibition is a portrait of him/ her. This experience of self-realisation is not different from the subject of Ali Kazim’s delicate watercolour pigments on paper (Hudhud, 2023), based on Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, in which a flock of birds searches for their king, Simorgh. During their long journey, some die and a few return. Only 30 birds survive and reach the Kaaf Mountain, the abode of their king. They are the king – since Simorgh means 30 birds.

The writer is an art critic based in Lahore