Between Light (1985–2020), installation view, Koel Gallery, Karachi, 2020
Between Light - Ayessha Quraishi Works: 1985-2020
A Mid-Career Retrospective
Curated by Zarmeene Shah
Koel Gallery, Karachi, 2020
Spanning three and a half decades, Between Light marked Ayessha Quraishi’s first mid-career retrospective, presenting the evolution of her practice across painting, drawing, journals, and time-based media. The exhibition traced a journey through recurring concerns with time, memory, and impermanence, revealing an intensely personal yet expansive visual language that resists linear categorization.
Curated by Zarmeene Shah, the retrospective situated Quraishi’s work within shifting conversations on abstraction, process, and the politics of presence and absence. Shah’s accompanying essay, In This Thundering Silence: A Space of Retrospect, unfolds Quraishi’s practice through the lenses of memory, consciousness, and the poetics of removal and residue.
A comprehensive monograph, published alongside the exhibition, brought together this curatorial text with critical essays and archival documentation, establishing Between Light as a landmark reflection on Quraishi’s oeuvre to date.
What follows is a walk through my practice over three and a half decades, guided by excerpts from curator Zarmeene Shah’s essay, In This Thundering Silence: A Space of Retrospect — On the Work of Ayessha Quraishi: 1985–2020. Paired with images from my mid-career retrospective, these passages trace the shifts in form, material, and thought that have shaped my journey as an artist.
Between Light (1985–2020), installation view, Koel Gallery, Karachi, 2020
Becoming Critical:
“The early drawings reveal a practice not yet codified but already marked by a consciousness of time’s accumulation — tentative gestures that hold within them the seeds of a language Quraishi would return to again and again. These are not mere beginnings, but thresholds: points at which observation turns inward, where line and form open onto the space of reflection.”
198917: Sitting with hands crossed, pen and oil on paper, 64 x 50 cm, 1989.
“One can already sense in these first works a movement toward the elemental; the line, the circle, the square, and the triangle. What emerged was a slow shedding of figuration in favor of the abstract, where gesture and mark-making were no longer tethered to representation but to the process itself.””
198918: Child 1, Pen and ink on paper, 26 x 26 cm, 1989.
198919: Child with Ant, Pen and ink on paper, 26 x 26 cm, 1989.
19951: Untitled, oil on paper, 58 x 90 cm, 1995
Across these passages called time, the shadow of a trace:
“Across these passages called time, there lingers the shadow of a trace — not presence in its fullness, nor absence in its finality, but the residue of both. Quraishi’s surfaces become repositories of memory: scraped, erased, re-layered, they enact the slow sedimentation of thought. Here, time is neither linear nor cyclical, but accumulative — thick with echoes. The canvas itself bears witness to the act of erasure and return, where every mark conceals as much as it reveals.””
19941 Untitled, ink and oil on paper, 68 x 55 cm, 1994
19943 Untitled, ink and oil on paper, 68 x 55 cm, 1994
“Here, time is neither linear nor cyclical, but accumulative — thick with echoes. The canvas itself bears witness to the act of erasure and return, where every mark conceals as much as it reveals.”
19993: Untitled, oil on paper, 55 x 68 cm, 1999.
19975: Untitled, oil on paper, 55 x 68 cm, 1997.
2000BKD, 2010BKD: Journals 1, various sizes, (2000-2010), 2020.
The book and the soul:
“The journals are at once private meditations and public offerings: fragments of text, gesture, and mark that refuse completion. They speak to the act of writing as much as to the act of painting, insisting on the book as an extension of the soul — not a vessel to contain knowledge, but a field in which consciousness inscribes itself across time.”
20035,6: Journal pages, oil on paper, 9 x 20 cm, 2003.
20031,2: Journal pages, oil on paper, 9 x 20 cm, 2003.
20037,8: Journal pages, oil on paper, 9 x 20 cm, 2003.
“The book becomes an extension of the soul — not a vessel to contain knowledge, but a field in which consciousness inscribes itself across time, each page an aperture onto the inner life of practice.”
20103,4: Journal pages, oil and cement on paper, 27 x 42 cm, 2010.
20111: Untitled, oil on paper, 104 x 97 cm, 2011
The deafening Roar of Silence (Or Painting as Process and Project):
“In the deafening roar of silence, Quraishi’s work finds its most paradoxical articulation. Painting is here less an image than an event: a process that resists closure, that continues beyond the frame of the canvas.”
201115: Desert Series, oil on timber, 75 x 31 cm, 2011.
201114: Desert Series, oil on timber, 75 x 31 cm, 2011.
201116: Desert Series, oil on timber, 75 x 31 cm, 2011.
“Each work is both removal and remainder, project and residue. Silence is not absence but fullness — a site of listening, a ground from which form emerges and to which it inevitably returns.”
20162: Open Presence, oil on paper, 114 x 63 cm, 2016. Between Light - Mid-Career Retrospective, 2020.
20161: A word of love, in the form of burning awareness, i offer, oil on paper, 112 x 74 cm, 2016.
This retrospective was not an arrival, but a pause — before I move onward. The works gathered here are traces of thirty-five years of practice, yet they remain unfinished, open, carrying with them the silence from which they first emerged.
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2020PH2: Between Light - Ayessha Quraishi Works:1985-2020, Mid-Career Retrospective, 2020.
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2020PH1: Between Light - Ayessha Quraishi Works:1985-2020, Mid-Career Retrospective, 2020.
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2020PH9: Between Light - Ayessha Quraishi Works:1985-2020, Mid-Career Retrospective, 2020.
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2020PH3: Between Light - Ayessha Quraishi Works:1985-2020, Mid-Career Retrospective, 2020.
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2020PH21: Between Light - Ayessha Quraishi Works:1985-2020, Mid-Career Retrospective, 2020.
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2020PH16: Between Light - Ayessha Quraishi Works:1985-2020, Mid-Career Retrospective, 2020.
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2020PH8: Between Light - Ayessha Quraishi Works:1985-2020, Mid-Career Retrospective, 2020.
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2020PH13: Between Light - Ayessha Quraishi Works:1985-2020, Mid-Career Retrospective, 2020.
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2020PH11: Between Light - Ayessha Quraishi Works:1985-2020, Mid-Career Retrospective, 2020.
