KARACHI: An exhibition titled “The Geography of Memory” at Canvas Gallery brings together four Pakistani artists based abroad, offering a reflective exploration of memory, identity and displacement through diverse contemporary art practices.
The featured artists, Noormah Jamal, Mustafa Mohsin, Usaydh Agha and Ruby Chishti, engage with memory as a fluid and embodied experience, shaping a layered narrative that connects personal recollection with collective histories. The exhibition presents memory as shifting and fragmented, expressed through distinct visual languages that together form a broader meditation on lived experience.
Jamal’s oil pastel works initially appear playful and childlike, characterised by simplified forms, vivid colours and dreamlike imagery. However, closer observation reveals a deeper symbolic structure in which natural and domestic elements coexist in ambiguous relationships, suggesting themes of vulnerability, transition and emotional complexity.
Her work draws on oral traditions and cultural references, constructing compositions that oscillate between the intimate and the mythic, where memory is portrayed as incomplete, layered and continuously evolving.
In one notable piece, Masharaan (Elders), Jamal depicts a row of elderly men seated side by side with closed eyes, their expressions conveying calmness and solemn reflection. The figures are dressed in differently coloured traditional kurtas, forming a rhythmic visual sequence that enhances the meditative tone of the work.
The exhibition collectively positions memory as something that can be reimagined and reconstructed, offering viewers a nuanced visual cartography of identity shaped by migration, cultural inheritance and emotional residue.