‘Perceptual Mirage’ marks a continuation of Waseem Ahmed’s long engagement with the miniature tradition as a critical contemporary language. Rather than approaching painting as heritage to be preserved, Ahmed treats it as a layered visual system, capable of articulating the structural violence, ideological rigidity and historical ambiguity that shape the present.

The exhibition at Karachi’s Sanat Initiative extends concerns that have remained central to Ahmed’s practice for over two decades: the circulation of power through images, the repetition of history, and the uneasy coexistence of beauty and brutality.

Ahmed emerged from the first generation of artists trained at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, who reconfigured miniature painting at the turn of the millennium. As the art historian, critic and curator Virginia Whiles has argued, neo-miniature practice did not signal a return to courtly aesthetics but a strategic appropriation of its discipline, scale and iconography to address contemporary political and social realities.

In this framework, the miniature becomes a site of tension rather than reverence, a form whose authority is interrogated from within. ‘Perceptual Mirage’ situates itself firmly within this........

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