Through Birds in Far Pavilions, Nusra Latif Qureshi invites us into her inner sanctum. Displayed across four spaces at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, this timely exhibition acknowledges the breadth of Qureshi’s artistic career while presenting her lifelong inquiries into the inadequacies of representation.

The exhibition commences with artworks Qureshi made in Pakistan including untitled, 1995, marking her graduation from the National College of Arts in Lahore. The work consists of five paintings, each marking a certain decade (roughly) of the political changes and events of Pakistan’s history and each accompanied by a text commenting on the era. Visitors will then encounter Museum of lost memories, 2024, commissioned by AGNSW on the occasion of this monographic exhibition. Qureshi describes this work as “constantly in the making, articulating loss through presence and substitution”. The installation gathers from the artist’s collection of cultural material combined with hand-picked objects, paintings and photographs from the art gallery’s collection with presentation cases and additional objects provided by the Powerhouse Museum. Described by Qureshi as an interventionalist approach, this new installation is an exciting beacon of what is to come in her practice.

Qureshi’s context for her unique craft of musaviri (a term used throughout West and South Asia that refers to local painting traditions) is weighted by the expectation of respect for traditions, the complexity and complicity of its masters and its dilution—marked by the force of colonisation and imperialism within the region. It takes a steady nerve and critical disobedience to reimagine the possibilities of traditional craft into a contemporary sensibility. Qureshi has honed and embodied this over three decades, opening doors for the further examination of history, representation of power and the complexities of the human condition.

The word meticulous is synonymous with her artworks. It also offers clues into her deep commitment to musaviri painting, a personalised methodology and style catalysed through Qureshi’s years at the National College of Arts. She says that this focus continued when she arrived on the shores of this continent for post-graduate studies at the Victorian College of the Arts.

“This tradition of painting has a certain kind of alignment with what I am and with what I sense that I have lost culturally, over generations”

”It was a very conscious decision to remain with the methodology of musaviri painting when I arrived in Australia, because I see myself belonging to a much larger entity, which is this tradition of painting,” she says. “But it is not just painting, it is a way of thinking—which is very different to how I grew up, and the majority of my art training.”

This is evident when considering the scope of Qureshi’s musaviri style. It draws upon a continuous becoming of her own personal subjectivity and attention to the language of traditional miniature painting, which was born out of the 16th century Mughal courts of Persia and evolved within the region.

“It’s not submissive, it is not a blind following,” she says. “I have very consciously rejected certain parts of the (musaviri) practice. I find a lot to disagree with.”

Unbinding the technique from the patronage of its foundations and filling it with ongoing research offers opportunities to question, subvert its insistent patriarchy and centre a continuous becoming of identity. Qureshi’s magnetic aptitude for her craft is in her ability to build worlds for independent discovery from often little-known histories, articulated through complex arrangements intended to draw pause.

“Histories are like imagined worlds, with all their distortions and malformations,” she says. “Later interpretations of grand histories, as in my work, are like imagining far-off lands, with their strangeness and romance magnified or inversely diminished.”

Like so many of us from the subcontinent, Qureshi’s experience is entwined with the social, political and economic structures of British and European colonialisms as well as the imperialism many empires continue to impose. For those of us in the diaspora, it is an existence steeped in paradox—one that is ouroboros in nature within the context of meaning-making or belonging. Qureshi’s artistic practice offers a personal solace for this experience, allowing her to interrogate and comprehend what has been forgotten.

“This tradition of painting has a certain kind of alignment with what I am and with what I sense that I have lost culturally, over generations,” she says. “Whenever I am able to connect to it, I gain, I grow, and this makes me remain faithful to this tradition, and I accept that this is an entity much larger than my practice.”

The exhibition’s third room groups artworks that have become synonymous with later-career explorations alongside figurative works that draw on abstraction and fragmentation. The final space collates artworks where the artist is portrayed indirectly as a female figure, or artworks encapsulating and prefacing the multitudes of the feminine through photography, collage and painting.

A further visual layer emerges through artworks selected by Qureshi over the course of a year of research into the AGNSW collection. These are purposefully placed throughout each of the four exhibition spaces, offering a reciprocal dialogue with Qureshi’s artworks and extending the many tendrils of each work on display.

Birds in Far Pavilions is only one passage of the boundless muraqqa—visual album— that is Qureshi’s artistic prowess. Stepping into the exhibition will be like encountering the artist’s acute gaze. Harnessing deliberative decision-making as a form of expression, to discover relationships between entities or oblique unformed thoughts—far from panoptic, these artworks are offerings to contend histories and reckon with identity.

Nusra Latif Qureshi: Birds in Far Pavilions
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Naala Nura (south building)
On now—15 June

This article was originally published in the January/February 2025 print issue of Art Guide Australia.