To dwell is to garden

The Aga Khan museum in Toronto opens to the public with the works of six Pakistani artists

KARACHI:

‘Garden of Ideas: Contemporary Art from Pakistan’, an exhibition being held at The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto beautifully explains the concept of a garden. “Created for pleasure, spiritual reflection, and aesthetic contemplation, gardens have held many meanings,” says its page on the museum’s website. “Beyond their beauty, they represent the human impulse to organise, contain, and collect the natural world. Without cultivation, a garden would cease to exist.”

These words aptly depict the relevance of gardens as they have been the creative foreground for many artists around the world. This time around, six contemporary Pakistani artists will be showcasing their romance with gardens at this exhibition, which will run from September 18 to January 18, 2015. The Aga Khan Museum was inaugurated on September 16.



“The second floor of the museum features two temporary exhibition galleries,” Azim Alibhai, Chief Communication Consultant at The Aga Khan Museum tells The Express Tribune. “The first inaugural exhibition in gallery one is called ‘In Search of the Artist: Signed Paintings and Drawings from the Aga Khan Museum Collection’ and the second is the one featuring Pakistani artists.”

The main floor of the museum features a permanent exhibition gallery, which displays around 250 to 350 of over 1,000 objects from The Aga Khan Museum collection. The Pakistani artists whose works are being showcased at the museum include Bani Abidi, Nurjahan Akhlaq, David Chalmers Alesworth, Aisha Khalid, Atif Khan and Imran Qureshi.



The exhibition is being curated by Sharmini Pereira, a curator-publisher who is based in Sri Lanka and New York. She has extensively written on contemporary Asian art. She is also the director and founder of Raking Leaves, an independent publishing organisation and the Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design in Sri Lanka.

“We believe that all visitors to the museum will benefit from this exhibition,” states Alibhai. “Most people are unaware of Pakistan’s rich cultural history and artistic traditions. These modern displays from six artists working with multimedia will be interesting for everyone.”

The artists involved with ‘Garden of Ideas: Contemporary Art from Pakistan’ have questioned and cross-examined the sense of eternity associated with a garden. Several art pieces have even been made in direct response to the works already present in the museum and the museum’s own reinterpretation of an Islamic garden (chahar bagh), as designed by the well-known architect, Vladimir Djurovic.



“I think His Excellency, Prince Karim Aga Khan, puts this venture in the most apt words: ‘One of the lessons we have learned in recent years is that the Islamic world and the Western world need to work together much more effectively at building mutual understanding, especially as these cultures interact and intermingle more actively’,” shares Alibhai.

“We hope that this museum will contribute to a better understanding of the peoples of Islam in all of their religious, ethnic, linguistic and social diversity,” Alibhai quoted Aga Khan as saying. Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper, who opened the museum along with Prince Aga Khan, said that the space will be “a source of inspiration, spiritual renewal and cultural awareness,” not only for Torontonians, but also for other visitors.

Pakistani artists showcasing at The Aga Khan Museum, Toronto

Bani Abidi

Nurjahan Akhlaq

David Chalmers Alesworth

Aisha Khalid

Atif Khan

Imran Qureshi

Published in The Express Tribune, September 18^th, 2014.

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