The Geography of Memory’ at Canvas Gallery brings together four Pakistani artists who live abroad: Noormah Jamal, Mustafa Mohsin, Usaydh Agha and Ruby Chishti.

Their practices engage memory as something porous, shifting and deeply embodied. The exhibition unfolds as a layered meditation on identity, displacement and the emotional residues of lived experience. Each artist approaches memory through a distinct visual language yet, together, they construct a nuanced cartography of the personal and the collective.

At first glance, Jamal’s oil pastel drawings appear almost childlike, with simplified forms, vivid colours and a playful, dreamlike sensibility. Yet, this apparent innocence gives way to something more complex. Her compositions operate as symbolic constellations where mountains, flames, celestial forms and domestic objects coexist in ambiguous relationships.

Figures drift between states, caught between vulnerability and quiet authority. Drawing on oral traditions and cultural motifs, Jamal creates images that feel both intimate and mythic, where memory appears fragmented, layered and unresolved.

A deeply introspective four-person exhibition in Karachi presented memory as something that can be reimagined and reconstructed

A deeply introspective four-person exhibition in Karachi presented memory as something that can be reimagined and reconstructed

In Masharaan (Elders), Jamal constructs a scene that is both intimate and ceremonial. A row of elderly men sits shoulder to shoulder, eyes closed, their expressions poised between repose and solemnity. Each figure wears a differently coloured kurta — purple, yellow, pink, ochre, green, red — creating a rhythmic chromatic........

© Dawn (Magazines)