Mohatta Palace Museum reopens with 'Gaj: Colours of the Rainbow'

Karachi’s renowned landmark, the Mohatta Palace Museum, on Thursday opened its doors to the public after a lockdown was imposed in March this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, stated a press release. 

A new exhibition, Gaj: Colours of the Rainbow focuses on embroidery, particularly that on a woman’s blouse. The embroidery of this hand-crafted garment is important not only as an adornment but also in establishing individual and group identity, and the interplay of different groups. The exhibition, displaying over 60 Gaj pieces belonging to several communities. 

The exhibition includes textiles from Sindh, Balochistan, Gilgit Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, drawing on several private collections, with some objects dating back over a hundred years or more. These varying styles of embroidery are unique to every part of the country and known as gaj in Sindh, jeegh in Balochistan, iraghi in the Hunza, Nagar and Ghizr valleys and gulkari in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

This exhibition continues a tradition at the Mohatta Palace Museum of displaying and documenting a range of handmade textiles from Pakistan, and to a certain extent, the wider region. Earlier exhibitions on the same theme include Threads in Time and the internationally acclaimed A Flower from Every Meadow. 

The exhibition, Gaj: Colours of the Rainbow is curated by Nasreen Askari who most notably co-curated the seminal exhibition Colours of the Indus: Costumes and Textiles of Pakistan at the prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1997. 

The catalogue of this exhibition has now become the standard reference on traditional textiles of Pakistan and remains in print even today. Nasreen Askari said, “We are delighted that the Museum is open to the public with an exhibition that builds on our established history of displaying textiles of antiquity and cultural significance.”