The importance of staying quiet
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.
3. Fahd Burki I
February 08 - April 07, 2026
The third exhibition in The importance of staying quiet opens with ‘Fahd Burki I’, a new body of paintings that continue an excavation of the image and bring forward speculative structural and spatial studies. Focusing entirely on two-dimensional works, this presentation explores depth, texture, and curvature, drawing at times from architecture and at others from nature.
The exercise, for us, was to pivot the conversation this project has initiated over the last five months. Moving from a two-part exploration of Lala Rukh’s visual vocabulary and use of retinal memory, we turn to how her much younger peer, Burki, has been exploring a similar distillation of the image through a decidedly different language. Both knew each other well and even exhibited together in group and two-person presentations, and so it becomes significant to this project to see how we could bridge the kind of abstraction that these artists employ.
Like Lala Rukh, Burki too is occupied deeply with the treatment of the surface, whether paper or canvas, and the use of monochromatic lines and washes. Both practices are slow and considered, and share a meticulous attention to detail. Unlike Lala Rukh, though, Burki’s interest is anchored in constructing volume and depth towards amorphous (but slightly familiar) forms, which then often float weightless on shadowy, airy, obscure, spatially indeterminate planes.
Burki’s imagery and style are often characterised as unpinnable because they refuse obvious -isms. Which largely is true. However, it is the organic evolution of his lines and forms, that move from totemic and structural to non-representational to complete absence, constantly, that defy specific labelling.
At present, his large and unworldly monoliths have receded in the background to reveal much smaller representations of brutalist forms that sometimes feel as though they are skittering like multi-legged beings. The visuals feel inferred, or on the verge of forming, rather than fully illustrative or fully anthropomorphic, and lean heavily into the structural. The forms feel architectural, but they are scaled down to the size of tools, parts, relics, or organisms. They read less like buildings and more like components, as if architecture has been dismantled into units that no longer know how to assemble themselves.
There are no traces of habitation. No doors that invite entry. No scale cues that accommodate bodies. These are spaces uninhabitable but not ruined. Stepping back, this body of work, together, feels dark, devoid of human life, almost death-like, but not wretched.
----
Fahd Burki I is the first iteration of a two-part dialogue that opens with two-dimensional paintings, which will be subverted completely in the second presentation as the work moves into the three-dimensional and a more obvious realisation of Burki’s spatial studies. That dialogue, which opens on April 14, will not necessarily provide a resolution but rather a separate complication of the artist’s aesthetic concerns.
/
About the artist
Fahd Burki (b. 1981, Lahore, Pakistan / Lives and works in Pakistan) graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore and received a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Selected exhibitions : Old Bone, THE BARRACKS Art Museum, Lahore, Pakistan / daydreams, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE, / Wheredoiendandyoubegin - On Secularity, 9th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art Gothenberg, Sweden / Folds of Belonging, Brisbane / Social Calligraphies, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland / 11th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea / The Missing One, OCA, Oslo, Norway / Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh / Carré d’Art - musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, Nîmes, France.