At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, spread across four rooms on the lowest floor of the main building, sits Nusra Latif Qureshi’s first major solo exhibition, Birds in Far Pavilions.
The exhibition is introduced with Did you come here to find history?, a digital print Qureshi created in 2009 for the 53rd Venice Biennale.
The print is nine metres wide and features 17 Mughal and Venetian paintings overlaid with Qureshi’s own passport photograph. The work responds directly to the city of Venice – and history itself – as an “imagined land”.
Placed like a marquee leading towards the show’s interior, it suggests the exhibition asks this question, too. Did you come here to find history? The inquiry, Qureshi explains, refers in part to “the relationship of artist with art history”.
That the exhibition plays with scale is fitting for an artist who was trained in musaviri, or Mughal miniature painting, at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan.
In Descriptions of past II (2001), golden plants sway beneath a woman’s feet.
You’d need a magnifying glass to appreciate the blades of grass emerging from the ground like pieces of hair, rendered as finely as the woman’s own wavy strands.
An installation on the far wall in the first room, Shafts in ground (2015), combines maps of the Costerfield antimony mines in........