Instances of art and architecture coming together as an uninterrupted whole — without any joints or junctures of forced connections — are rare. An exhibition of works at Mubarak Haveli for the Lahore Biennale 01, titled Invitation to Action, is one such instance. Curated by Pakistani researcher, curator and artist Mariah Lookman, the exhibition is a curatorial labour of love. The architecture of Mubarak Haveli — with its frugal geometry, its introspective layout, its balance of sun-bleached and stone-cool spaces — is as close to perfect as can be for a display of works by the late artists Lala Rukh and Zahoor ul Akhlaq and the likes of Aisha Khalid among the contemporary ones.

Situated in a tangle of alleys behind Bhatti Gate, the modest white haveli appears to be a mirage at first, offering an unreal sense of calm in the midst of a cacophonous wilderness of shops, stalls and straggling vehicles. A narrow lane bifurcates from the main street to lead up to a whitewashed façade with a green wooden doorway. Beyond the doorway is a large courtyard from which a series of steps leads into a smaller courtyard lined on all four sides by rooms and connecting passageways. In these low-roofed, unadorned rooms and interstices are drawings by Minam Apang and T. Shanaathanan, photographs by Rasel Chowdhury, prints by Muhanned Cader, video works by Mahbub Shah and Alia Syed, sculptural pieces by Ayesha Sultana, a sound piece by Asvajit Boyle and a text-based intervention by Ayesha Jatoi.

An introductory text informs us that the charged title and corresponding spirit of the show is from Saadat Hasan Manto’s oeuvre — in particular, from a story in Siyah Hashiye (Black Margins) from his collection of terse, acerbic stories informed by the Partition of India. Siyah Hashiye is itself a combination of words that could complement the understated aesthetic of this show, and the thin, pruned artworks in it are, inversely, the products of intense and exhaustive practices. And no body of work better exemplifies this duality than that by Lala Rukh’s.

A beautifully curated exhibition at Mubarak Haveli in Lahore’s old city seamlessly joins art with architecture

Lala Rukh’s mixed media works on photographic paper flicker in the shadowy depths of a room. Since her passing in 2017, the local arts circuit has been inundated with tributes to her life and work. One cautiously imagines to have finally become acquainted with the work of an elusive artist. But confronting some of this work physically — in what feels like a hidden keep where sounds of the outside world are dim and insubstantial — is an experience nothing short of sacred. Sinuous rivers of light unravel gently on dark oceans. Innumerable bright gashes distort the placid surfaces of seas. The horizons are distant, the skies vaporous and heavy. However, being able to represent light and water with their protean characters and with such deftness that not a stroke is superfluous, was one of the many things that were Lala Rukh’s forte.

We are reminded that these pared down works are about much more than their technical superiority. They are also, as Lookman points out in her curatorial note, about ‘political agency.’ All the artists whose works are displayed at the Mubarak Haveli are South Asian and have incorporated into their art, in one form or another, the past, present and augured future of their swiftly changing region.

This is also reflected in Zahoor ul Akhlaq’s keen study of Indo-Persian miniature painting, and the ultimate emancipation of the art form from its confines. It is visible also in Muhanned Cader’s broken up and cut-out terrains, which speak of disintegrated civilisations, lands bartered for profit, and worlds’ lost and found by way of the sea. The sense of loss is never far from these works.

It is acutely fitting that the Mubarak Haveli houses the Naqsh School of Arts — a seminary of traditional artistic disciplines — and is also an Imambargah. It is, therefore, in more ways than one, a site where memory and tradition are revered and celebrated, and where resistance to tyranny is also symbolically enacted. It is the sacredness of memory and tradition, and the necessity of innovation and resistance, that are also at the heart of most of the practices revealed here for LB 01.

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 1st, 2018