Farazeh Syed’s exhibition ‘All the Women in Me’ at Karachi’s Canvas Gallery prosecutes the colonial archive: its camera, its titles, its voracious gaze, while nurturing — patiently and insistently — the lives of women crushed by that record.

The exhibition brings together paintings on canvas and wasli that rework found colonial photographs of South Asian women, set in conversation with intimate personal images drawn from the artist’s familial past. Syed uses photographs of her legendary grandmother, the singer Malika Pukhraj, who spent her later years in Lahore. Syed spent several formative years closely attached to her and says that the photographs “represent a South Asian woman from the same era who was fierce and formidable in her strength and vulnerable and fallible in her humanness. They, thus, serve as a contrast to the denial of individuality, autonomy and agency in the colonial images.”

Syed reads violence in these images — violence through detached reflection, through distortion and erasure, through a gaze that spoke for women while denying them voice. In her paintings, that violence is neither sensationalised nor aestheticised — it is held in tension with a repaired register.

The works on wasli are the most........

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