ahd Burki’s recent work, on display at the Barracks Art Museum, is visual in its fullest connotation. It dispenses with the need for sound, smell, touch, or taste – since all these senses seem satiated in the presence of his paintings and sculptures. Mysterious, mute, sombre and minimal, his work connects with a viewer (a single human being, not a group) who, much like a reader with a book, engages with it in solitude – if not in solace.

This happened to me when, for some odd reason, I missed the opening day rush and visited the exhibition a few weeks later. I realised that although I had unintentionally missed the inauguration, I was fortunate to have avoided the crowd.

Burki’s art demands individual focus and intimate attention. Aside from the first, each of the adjoining galleries in the subterranean space contains a single item. This initiates a dialogue – actually a monologue – because unless sound is attached to a creation, all paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, digital prints, mixed media and installations remain silent. Like literary books, sheets of musical notation, pages of legal documents, text messages on phones and emails in our inboxes, these artworks are encountered in stillness. Shapes are translated into sounds in our heads and are then given meaning. What is received, therefore, is not external but internally generated.

Once a human being dies, presumably, the entire world ceases to exist – for them.

Fahd Burki’s recent work, on display at the Barracks Art Museum, is visual in its fullest connotation. It dispenses with the need for sound, smell, touch or taste – since all these senses seem satiated in the presence of his paintings and sculptures. Mysterious, mute, sombre and minimal, his works connect with a viewer (a single human being, not a group) who, much like reading a book, encounters it in solitude – if not in solace.

This happened to me when, for some odd reason, I missed the opening day rush and visited the show a few weeks later. I realised that although I had unintentionally missed the inauguration, I was fortunate to have avoided the crowd.

Burki’s art demands individual focus and intimate attention. Apart from the first, each of the adjoining galleries in the subterranean space contains a single exhibit. This initiates a dialogue – actually a monologue – because unless sound is attached to a creation, all paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, digital prints, mixed media, and installations remain silent. Like literary books, sheets of musical notation, pages of legal documents, text messages on mobile phones, and emails in our computer systems, these artworks are encountered in stillness. Shapes are translated into sounds inside our heads and are further converted into meaning. What is received, therefore, is not external but internally generated.

Once a human being dies, presumably, the entire world ceases to exist – for them.

Fahd Burki’s artworks invoke that solitary state – unsurprisingly, given that the artist, a graduate of the National College of Arts, Lahore (2003), and recipient of a diploma from the Royal Academy of Art, London (2010), has been living and working in Lahore, yet is rarely seen at exhibition openings or social events, and is not involved in networking – physically or virtually. On the contrary, he remains largely invisible, even somewhat unapproachable. This, however, does not suggest that he has nothing to say. Quite the opposite: whenever Burki is invited to evaluate and review graduating students’ work at his alma mater, his insight, intelligence and commentary are striking; his comments clear, incisive and composed.

That clarity is visible in his recent solo exhibition, Old Bones (February 16–April 18), at the Barracks Art Museum in Lahore – a structure that went unnoticed for years until it was cleaned and repurposed as a venue for contemporary art, situated in the middle of a public park. The garden, if one were to dig just a little deeper, might reveal the bones of birds and animals long dead and buried beneath the soil – creatures that once flew, fought, fled, moved and uttered sounds, but after their brief lives on earth, now lie within the silence of the land. It seems as though Fahd Burki is resurrecting these old bones – ones not limited to a specific site, era or species but embodying a broader, shared sense of decay, departure and death. His work, as the artist notes, is a response to the space, “evocative of a bomb shelter or ancient catacombs.”

Burki’s work connects with a viewer who, much like reading a book, engages with it in solitude – if not in solace.

Made from cedar, beech and other materials, Burki’s sculptures can be described as minimalist in the same way that tantric paintings are considered elementary. The title of the exhibition, Old Bones, is not only a reference to the physical appearance of the sculptures – or their material (wood, the bones of a tree once its bark, or skin, is peeled away) – but also a reflection of the nature of the artworks themselves. Through the subtraction of extraneous elements, these pieces present an essential reality. Like the bones of a living being – the fundamental structure that balances, bears, binds and bends the flesh, and that survives after the body disintegrates – Burki’s work seeks what endures beyond surface and decay.

The creative process, in this sense, mirrors that idea. One begins with a heavy load of ideas, inspirations, observations, skills and materials – but over time, sheds the excess, the unnecessary, much like refining a text from its first draft to a final, edited version.

In Burki’s hands, wood becomes a kind of consolidated paint. The elegance with which he constructs his three-dimensional forms – the refined surfaces, the minimal yet precise detailing – introduces a new context to the idea of the sublime. Unlike the emblematic canvases of Barnett Newman or Ad Reinhardt, which are emptied of recognisable reference, Burki’s art, though abstract, subtly and convincingly suggests the presence of a tangible body – something that once lived but has now been reduced to its barest form.

Take Bastion, for instance. The title evokes a built structure, yet Burki merges the architectural motif with an anthropomorphic form and a mythical presence. The fabrication of the piece reveals the artist’s thought process: a stocky form built with seamlessly joined sections, reinforcing its organic quality. What a visitor encounters in the gallery is the quiet omnipresence of this sculpture – not too large, not overwhelming, but deeply arresting in its stillness.

Complementing the other work displayed in the room – particularly the small acrylic on canvas Kiva (literally, a wholly or partially underground chamber, sometimes used for religious rites) – this piece consists of four curved lines converging at varying levels to form a circle. The subtlety of its grey tones, in an uncanny way, mirrors the layout of its location.

The next gallery space features a large, obelisk-like form – perhaps the remains of a stunned cobra – comprising a thick suspended body crowned by a pointed, flattened head with two holes. Titled Old Bone, the sculpture, in both its production and presentation, evokes a serpent, seemingly gazing at the viewer through its hollow eye sockets. A snake is typically associated with its coils, and even in death, retains its limp and elastic character. Yet Burki, through the use of an erect spinal line, has rendered the reptile stiff – arresting not only the movement of its body but also, metaphorically, the flow of time.

Another piece, a curious amalgamation of industrial product and natural object, is titled Aero. The title, as well as the form and material (gesso with wood), alludes to the tip of the vertical stabiliser of an aeroplane. The slightly turned top edge introduces a suggestion of a bird’s body – or beak – into what is otherwise an aeronautical structure. Yet there remains the trace of bone, as the form – equally divided between brown, grainy wood and a coat of white paint – resembles a cleaned and polished bone. In Aero, the divide is made explicit by a sharp line, but throughout the entire exhibition, the viewer continues to speculate on the boundary between hand-crafted artwork and mechanically manufactured product – or, more broadly, the line separating the life of a natural species and the life-cycle of an industrial object.

In some pieces, the demarcation between the natural and the mechanical blurs. As the artist explains, each piece “was hand-carved to shape the grain and, in some instances, assembled with metal reinforcements to unify the form” – a quality evident in Seed and Hearth. The former, though a natural substance, is constructed with the symmetry and precision of a mechanical object; the latter, a man-made entity (a hearth being either the home or the lower part of a furnace), appears almost organic. Both suggest the cycle of reproduction – of humans and other living beings. Seed, commonly associated with both human regeneration and agricultural growth, carries biblical resonance: “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground” (Genesis 1:11, ESV).

Other sculptures from Old Bones also emanate an atmosphere of devotion, reverence and reticence – so intense that within the overarching silence of his art, the humming of the air-conditioning units becomes intrusive, even violent. Burki’s work, which resists classification within conventional art historical frameworks such as minimalism, might find a more fitting descriptor in terms like ‘complete’ or ‘final.’ As Joseph Brodsky, favouring poetry over prose for its compactness, once said: “Whatever a work of art consists of, it runs to the finale which makes for its form and denies resurrection. After the last line of a poem nothing follows except literary criticism.”

Art criticism – in the case of Fahd Burki’s work.

The writer is a visual artist, an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He can be contacted on quddusmirza@gmail.com.