The group exhibition ‘The Invisible Collapse’, held at Karachi’s Canvas Gallery, brings together four artists whose practices emerge from distinctly different lived realities, yet converge around a common concern: the experience of marginalisation.

Whether shaped by disability, gender, geography, political violence or ethnicity, the works of Attiya Shaukat, Rabia Farooqui, Maisam Hussain and Syed Hussain explore what it means to belong to a society that simultaneously excludes. The exhibition unfolds through deeply personal narratives, revealing the invisible fractures that quietly shape contemporary Pakistan.

Attiya has spent more than two decades navigating life in a wheelchair, after a fall just before presenting her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) thesis at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore in 2004 left her paralysed from the waist down. Rather than allowing disability to define her, she has transformed it into a language of resilience, self-examination and artistic inquiry. Her artist’s statement speaks of continually searching for inner strength and embracing experimentation as an essential part of her practice.

Frida Kahlo appears as an important artistic companion in Let the Dice Roll I and II, where stitched thread intersects with portraits of the Mexican artist, whose own physical suffering has long become part of art history. In To Be or Not To Be I, Kahlo’s face is stripped of every feature except her unmistakable unibrow, while her exposed heart extends through branching veins towards Attiya’s own seated........

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