In 2014, The importance of staying quiet was exhibited in Hong Kong as an attempt to acknowledge a minimal vocabulary within Pakistani art. Conceived by Saira Ansari and Umer Butt, the presentation brought together works spanning six decades, between the 1950s and 2010s and included Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–1985), Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941–1999), Lala Rukh (1948–2017), Rashid Rana (b. 1968), Hamra Abbas (b. 1976), Sara Salman (b. 1978), Ali Kazim (b. 1979), Ayesha Jatoi (b. 1979), Fahd Burki (b. 1981) and Iqra Tanveer (b.1983).
Rather than showing signature works often associated with these artists – most of whom are not minimalists – the exhibition highlighted moments where they pared form and image down to their most distilled elements. The proposition was that minimal vocabularies in Pakistan are not anomalies or exceptions, but part of a more layered understanding of artistic abstraction in the region.
A decade later, The importance of staying quiet returns as a year-long dialogic exchange between Butt and Ansari and will include a series of presentations shaped through discursive encounters. This time, the programme will examine the development of practices that have deliberately engaged minimal or abstract strategies. This exercise is not only about tracing a lineage of abstraction, but about sustaining a way of looking that requires deeper reading and slower appreciation.
The first exhibition of The importance of staying quiet opens with Lala Rukh’s photographic archives from herc years at the University of Chicago (1974–76).
While pursuing a second master’s degree at nearly thirty, Lala already had a trained eye, but these images reveal the sharpening of her framing and the intent of her gaze. This exhibition revisits that gaze, bringing together early works that carry a cinematic sense of composition before arriving at her later language of minimal abstraction.
Photography was central to Lala’s life yet largely unseen by the public until Sagar (2017) offered a first glimpse into how her retinal memory developed. The exhibition included photographic documentation of rivers and seas across India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Burma, shot during her travels between 1992 and 2005. Each composition follows a specific format, where water bodies, the horizon and the sky feature in varying proportions. The absence of people and objects is consistent. Among the countless images she took, Lala’s selection for the exhibition revealed solitude and an intimacy with the waterscapes, preserving fleeting moments in time.
The Chicago photographs, however, are different. They are not minimal or abstract. They contain architecture, people, animals, objects and most importantly, construct narratives. Additionally, the ‘set’ and direction recall filmic technique. Where a person or an animate body is absent, the scene is weighted with arrival or departure.
These photos document Lala’s new surroundings and influences. The artist was broadening her perspective, and encountering art, music and politics that encouraged experimentation. While these elements are present in the photographs, they are not the main subject of this presentation. Instead, the elemental techniques of printing – resised reproductions of film negatives and pairing frames in diptychs, triptychs and other polyptych sequences – are centred.
Lala’s works on photo paper and other forms of mixed media printing are more clearly offshoots of her photography practice. But her characteristic affinity for rigour, design and precision can also be seen at play here. Together they foreshadow the ways her later works were composed, executed and presented.
Press release from Grey Noise
Image: Lala Rukh. Untitled 9. Chicago archives 1974 – 1976. Black and white photograph. 20.4 x 25.2 cm. Photography by Daniella Baptista. Image courtesy of the Estate of Lala Rukh and Grey Noise
