Patched Cloak

​Vasl Artists’ Association proudly commences its 25th Anniversary celebrations by launching the 2026 programming calendar with Patched Cloak, a solo exhibition by acclaimed filmmaker and artist Babar Sheikh. This milestone event weaves together visual art, literature, and tradition.

In Patched Cloak, Babar Sheikh presents a compelling body of audio, video & photographic work that emerges from an intensive period of fieldwork undertaken throughout 2022. This series represents a pivotal chapter in his ongoing research project, Sufi Karachi: Symbols, Rituals and Narratives, documenting repeated site visits to dargahs situated within the urban sprawl of Karachi and its peripheral neighbourhoods.

​The artist’s inquiry is driven by a sustained fascination with the materiality of devotion. Babar investigates how objects, offerings, and everyday artifacts come to inhabit sacred spaces, examining the transformation that occurs once these items cross the physical and spiritual threshold of the shrine. Through his lens, these elements cease to be merely incidental or decorative; instead, they are revealed as vital components of a larger spiritual, social, and symbolic ecology.

​Babar’s photographs attend strictly to the presence of these objects as silent carriers of memory, devotion, and lived belief. By training his gaze on the most visible yet frequently overlooked visual languages within the dargah, he traces the quiet negotiations that occur between the sacred and the ordinary. The work captures the delicate interplay between ritual and residue, highlighting the tension between the permanence of the architecture and the flux of human interaction.

​Collectively, Patched Cloak functions as a visual meditation on how meaning settles into space. The images suggest that sanctity is not just inherent in the structure, but is constructed layer by layer through repeated acts of faith, communal care, and everyday presence. In documenting these textured environments, Babar offers a nuanced portrait of Karachi’s spiritual landscape, where the mundane and the divine are inextricably woven together.

​The evening features the launch of Sheikh’s first book, Sufi Karachi: Symbols, Rituals and Narratives at 5:20 PM, accompanied by a soulful Sufi Kalam recital by Subhan Ahmed Nizami Qawwal at 5:00 PM.

The show continues until January 17, 2026.