The drive to Sanat Initiative takes you past the busy M.T. Khan Road, which leads to the bustling old city areas of Kharadar on one side and Karachi Port on the other. Past the traffic jam of heavy trailers and rickshaws, around flyovers, a detour branches to the quaint Miskeen Gali. Past this road with godowns on one side, but which still gives you the old neighbourhood vibe, you turn into Sanat’s gallery space, housed in a warehouse.

This location for Brooklyn-based artist Khalil Chishtee’s recent solo exhibition could not have been more appropriate. The expanse of the rough cemented ground, with minimal intervention to the warehouse structure, allows for the dismembered complexity of Karachi to momentarily enter the reading of the work.

The show ‘Nisbat Road to Troutman Street’ is a series of predominantly figurative, mixed media works constructed with grocery, trash and other bags through a layering, cutting and assemblage, in which the figure and metropolis emerge. The process of making, dismantling, peeling and un-peeling mirror Chishtee’s multilayered concerns. Thematically tied to the dislocation and disruption of his times, Chishtee and his artistic practice has journeyed long, going back to the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

As a boy........

© Dawn (Magazines)