Seher Shah, Argument from Silence (hand with wreath) (detail), 2019
Qatar Museums, the nation’s preeminent institution for art and culture, today announced its fall 2024 exhibitions programme. Among the highlights are MANZAR: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today, an unprecedented exhibition on the diverse and rich landscape of visual art and architecture from Pakistan and its diasporas; The Art and Influence of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), the first major exhibition on the artist in the Middle East; Splendours of the Atlas: a Voyage Through Morocco’s Heritage, exploring the multifaceted heritage of Islamic Morocco and organised as part of the ongoing Qatar-Morocco 2024 Year of Culture; Ellsworth Kelly at 100, the American painter and sculptor’s first-ever retrospective in the Middle East; and the first Forensic Architecture exhibition in the Gulf region.
MANZAR: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today
1 November 2024 – 31 January 2025
Presented at the National Museum of Qatar
The future Art Mill Museum is organising a major exhibition on art and architecture from Pakistan from the 1940s to the present day. Originated in Arabic, the word Manzar (منظر) in Urdu can be translated to mean a scene, a view, a landscape, or a perspective, highlighting the extraordinary vitality of the diverse art scenes in Pakistan and its diasporas.
A selection of approximately 200 paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, tapestries, and miniatures present multi-faceted modernities and contemporary practices. Tracing divergent narratives, perspectives, histories and presents, this multidisciplinary exhibition will focus on the deep engagement of artists and architects in continuity and discontinuity, and in the transference of knowledge, resilience and continued ecological concerns.
Spanning over eight decades, this groundbreaking exhibition traces how artists and architects have forged diverse personal and political languages, in dialogue or disjunction with regional styles and international art and world histories. The interconnections with scenes, individuals and communities in the subcontinent and on a global scale are testament to the strength of art withstanding imposed and desired divisions or movements. The land that is geographically defined as present-day Pakistan is an ancient one, even while the country is young.