The Art Mill Museum and the National Museum of Qatar mount an ambitious survey of Pakistan
Manzar: Art and Architecture from Pakistan, 1940s to TodayThe National Museum of QatarThrough January 31, 2025The promise of formally daring buildings extends to their contents. What happens inside must be bold and unusual too, right? The National Museum of Qatar opened in 2019, designed by Jean Nouvel after the form of a mineral crystal that blooms in intersecting clusters of flattened disks. It is an extraordinary object: its matte, sand-colored concrete surface absorbs daytime shadows and reddens beautifully in the dusk. Of course, the closer you get, the more the illusion of an impossibly big mineral resolves into a building, and once you go inside, the wild promise of the exterior normalizes into gently angular spaces, which are less of a headache to fill with people and art. Today these interiors host Manzar: Art and Architecture from Pakistan, 1940s to Today, the first survey of its kind. The ambitious project covers 80 years of Pakistani history, from before partition to today, and it is a kind of manifesto by the Art Mill Museum, a Qatari institution that plans to open in 2032, and its intent to be international and multidisciplinary. Manzar was curated by Caroline Hancock and Zarmeene Shah for art, and Aurlien Lemonier for architecture, as a linear chronology that is about two-thirds art, one-third architecture, in distinctly separate segments embedded with vitrines of historical materials like newspapers.Community Centre (2024), by Yasmeen Lari (Kuzey Kaya Buzlu/ Qatar Museums)It is packed with discoveries, from the easily-appreciated zip of Bani Abidis video works to the multidisciplinary and multimedia range of Imran Mir and Shahzia Sikander, and subtler choices about how to tell the story, like acknowledging the long partition and including material on the Bangladesh independence strugglethough a Western visitor might miss the bravery since the display is tucked into a corner. It took a Pakistani acquaintance to point out that we still arent taught about it in school. Im astonished that they included it.It must have been a challenge to imagine what kind of visitor the exhibition would be talking to in an exhibition where most of the artworks, names, and stories will be unfamiliar to most. That could be why this exhibition feels scholarly; and it is a scholarly achievement to put so many names in broader international circulationtimely too, when many of the protagonists are in their 80s and 90s, and their archives in need of long-term homes. The video interviews and the accompanying publication (especially its bibliography) are intended as material for future work, and sustain the curators claim that this is only a first step. The modesty is encoded in the title: Manzar can mean a scene, a view, a landscape, or a perspective in Urdu. But exhibitions are not tentative in their nature; cram all that effort and expertise and history in a series of rooms and it cant help but be convincing, which is a problem for a project that wants to be foundational and propositional all at once. The space, the vitrines, the materials, the labelsmuseums speak with weight and authority that contradicts an open project. This intent is correct and it is very contemporary. But its implementation still uses old-fashioned tools and conventions, and Manzar stumbles over this gap, which is most noticeable in the architectural parts of the exhibition.The first building we see is the Tarbela Dam, which is presented as a historical note instead of as the kind of project thats typically excluded from architecture. Its a detail, but for a new institution with the ambition to claim its place and the freedom to define itself and its methodswhy not cross the line? And once you notice one conventional choice, you see them everywhere.Behrupiya (2024) by Mariah Lookman (Kuzey Kaya Buzlu/ Qatar Museums)Weaving art and architecture into one exhibition is difficult, and Manzar illustrates how much architecture suffers when architectural objects are treated like artworks, conventionally. Its as if the exhibition wasnt made by a new institution at all, but had come direct from MoMA or Pompidou.Plastic art hides less from visitors than do architectural drawings, photographs, and publications that can only represent processes, so architectural objects sit alongside artworks like shy cousins at the partypresent, but a lot of effort to talk to. So half the exhibition speaks, the other half is silent, and the multidisciplinary promise of the title, the and between Art and Architecture, remains a tempting idea. Weaving together two disciplines and narrating the complexity of architectural stories for a contemporary audience requires more than wee labels and a wall text far away. Thankfully there are the videos: groups of interviews are presented separately from the objects they reference. But as fascinating and charming as it is to hear artists and architects speak, these interviews can only do so much because they, like everyone else, tell the stories they want people to know. Should curators challenge self-narratives? Convention says, no.After a few rooms of art and historical introduction, the first section dedicated to architecture occurs about midway through the exhibition, with midcentury projects by some of the expected namesEdward Durell Stone, Neutra, Doxiadis, cochardas well as by new ones like Muzharul Islam, Medhi Ali Mirza, and Mohammad Abdul Ahed. Yasmeen Lari appears too, as the only woman in a group photo from 1956. This is the first architectural island, titled Nation Building and two stories in this section could have had obvious contemporary relevance: mass migration and new cities.Hasan Homes (1972) by Arif Hasan (Courtesy Arif Hasan)Migration could have been discussed through the spatial stories of post-partition refugees who arrived in incredible numbers to cities like Karachi. Their adaptation and accommodation produced teachable mistakes like Doxiadiss masterplan and Korangi development. And new cities could have been approached through a case study of Islamabad, which seems like it should have resonated with local Qatari visitors as well as viewers from other Gulf states. But the visitor is left to make the connections for themself. The second room dedicated to architecture is based on 70s regionalism, around the time of the Zia coup, and it introduces more names like Habib Fida Ali, Kamil Khan Mumtaz, and Nayyar Ali Dada. The latters Alhamra Arts Council gets a handsome new model for the show, surrounded by abundant original material it is the most detailed project in the exhibition, but we arent told why its important. Laris handsome drawings for the Angoori Bagh People Housing Programme 1975 and Experimental Building from 1981 are also treated like puzzle boxes, intriguing and silent.Only the videos tell stories. In one of them, Arif Hasan said: Doxiadis did not understand sociology, and goes onto explain continuing effects of the optimistic Greeks early planning mistakes. Hasan also talks about racists and refugees, and of stepping in to stop displacements that would have been catastrophic. Since the video is around the corner from the relevant display, you have to make the link yourself, if you know the projects well enough to remember which is which. All the contemporary reading that a critical and informed visitor expects is in these videos. The architects talk about context and process, their personal experiences of turning away from personal ego and from powerful people, or crossing class boundaries. Lari recalls being asked: Show us where the chickens will go?Fathers House 18981994 (1994) by Zarnia, courtesy Taimur Hassan Collection. (Kuzey Kaya Buzlu/ Qatar Museums)Memory of a Pink (2012) by Huma Mulji, courtesy Taimur Hassan Collection. (Kuzey Kaya Buzlu/ Qatar Museums)When artarchitectural contact does happen it is through artworks like Zarinas somber floor plans from memory and Huma Muljis pink painting of a wall fragment, both of which summon lost places. The more recent works at the end of the exhibition most naturally blend art and architecture through urban Karachi pop, cinema ads, bazaars, and stickers. So do artworks on the politics of land and human and nonhuman bodies: Seema Nusrats collages of blast sandbags and Naiza Khans long presence on Manora Island both pull on threads that lead from the colonial era through globalization to American drone strikes.The exhibitions final act is a courtyard where the stars are a group of charming and hopeful pavilions designed by Lari and made of natural materials by Pakistani craftswomen brought to Qatar. Here, at last, are architectural objects that can stand on their own.Lev Bratishenko is writer and recovering curator.
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