very year, there is more contemporary art, and every few years, a new account of it will be required for art galleries, art festivals and biennials. In this respect, 2024 was no exception. The proliferation of art, however, in the country compelled one to wonder if new art’s cultural role is to re-imagine and re-manufacture the structural state of the contemporary, just as the twenty-four-hour news cycle creates liveness by repeating the same ‘breaking stories’ over and over again. It might be well to remember that there is nothing natural about the contemporary – it is not an innocent experience of presentness but the perpetual resurrection of the capitalist market. It would require more space to analyse why, in recent years, the balance of curatorial competence and institutional power seems to have tilted towards commercial enterprise, as though, at this moment, only capital can sustain artistic knowledge and mediate aesthetic desire.

History has become a costume drama, an archive of aesthetic styles to be re-animated. Its travesty consists in arbitrarily arranging historical signs within an eternal present without concern or respect for chronology or context. The aesthetic generation of the contemporary is part of a broader programme of forgetting what one saw yesterday superseded by what one sees today. Describing modern and contemporary art as a succession of movements on the one hand and as a pluralist riot of biennials on the other seems banal. For the younger artist today, the art-historical precedent is either irrelevant or non-existent.

2024 saw the 57th edition of the Venice Biennale titled, Foreigners Everywhere, which asked us to look to the ‘foreign’ and indigenous artists who suggested their own alternative paths forward, with a fair visibility of art and artists from Pakistan.

Pakistan first witnessed the Lahore Biennale 2024. Curated by John Tain, titled Of Mountains and Seas, it was hounded by questions about what it really accomplished and its relation to more mainstream art histories: Did it radically expand our canon of modern and contemporary artists? Did it suggest doing away with canons altogether by overlooking the concept of what is relevant to the theme? In systematically structured transgressions, the curator eroded the traditional categories and disintegrated the genres (i.e., the willful collapse of those boundaries that had distinguished painting from sculpture or performance from spectatorship) by giving the viewer modernism’s many progressive guises.

The Karachi Biennale 2024, in comparison, was less ostentatious. Featuring established and emerging artists from Europe and South Asia, this low-key exhibition continued its mandate to bring local artists and regional concerns to an art platform. In this fourth edition of the Biennale, Waheeda Baloch, the Sindh-based curator, brought together a host of works that mined current events in the exhibition titled Rizq/ Risk. Although the calibre of the work in the show was not consistent and the frustration of flitting between different venues was exacerbated by Karachi’s hot and humid environment, the Biennale can be applauded for the way in which disparate works excavated new ways and methodologies of presenting basic human concerns.

The need for a nuanced approach was fulfilled by the many works in Dharti Dhar Dhar Dharke Gi: Artist as Witness, curated by Salima Hashmi at COMO in Lahore, that movingly contended with the political and structural conditions that have produced the category of the political dialectic in specific contexts. Of these, the most lauded might have been Imran Qureshi’s installation – the artist who featured large in 2024: at COMO with a solo presentation titled Home, preceded by The Garden at the newly-founded The Barracks Art Museum in Nasser Bagh, Lahore.

Apart from private art spaces such as Kaleido Kontemporary in Lahore and new initiatives such as Numaish Karachi, which showcased Muzummil Ruheel’s Khayal/ Imagine at Khaliq Dina Hall curated by Saima Zaidi in 2024, The Barracks turned out to be a transformative experience, opening our eyes to the possibility of art in space while destabilising the museum-as-institutions relationship to what makes an exhibition.

Jhuley Laal: Crafting the Contemporary, curated by Saima Zaidi and mounted at the Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi, sought to chiefly represent and honour, through its emphasis on understanding ‘culture’ with agency and rights, indigenous ways of knowing. The show summoned communication across species, translation in the form of virtual repatriation – an index of loss and a gesture toward reparation.

2024 represented a stage on which the art and agendas of crucial initiatives became more internationally visible than ever before. Manzar: Art and Architecture from Pakistan – 1940s to Today, hosted at the National Museum in Doha, Qatar, and presented by the future Art Mill Museum, was jointly curated by Caroline Hancock, Aurelien Lemonier and Zarmeené Shah. The show was a challenge – a dagger, perhaps – thrust at the heart of a field that imagines that meaning in art is produced through an exchange of experiences between ‘equals’ in terms of cultural knowledge. By turning this logic on its head and by constructing ways in which those subscribing to the dominant art orthodoxies might even feel excluded at certain precious moments, the exhibition threatened to generate a political moment in its own terrain. In retrospect, the emotions that lingered after visiting Manzar were ambivalent ones of admiration and uncertainty. The show ushered in an emergent metric for its own evaluation. The very difficulty of gauging its success is entwined with the need to radically overhaul conventions of exhibition-making, a project to which it offered an undeniably important contribution.

The number of deaths in the art world over the past few months feels notable. It is as if we were preparing to close a decades-long chapter of art history. While we lost Richard Serra, Faith Ringgold, Frank Stella, Bill Viola, Frank Auerbach and S Ramachandran, internationally, to name only a handful, we also lost Shahid Jalal and Mansur Rahi. These deaths cast a shadow over the art world. The prevailing sense that a generational shift is under way is credible. The founders of today’s galleries are preparing and/ or executing their succession plans. The artists who came to prominence with them are fading into oblivion. In our own ways, we all face the question of how to remember, if not also mourn, the community that defined the art world we inherited. Perhaps we pay our respects by acknowledging their vision, by building on their legacies by embarking on the paths they led us toward but did not themselves take.

The writer is an art critic based in Islamabad