Taaza Tareen 18 The Unwritten Archive

Cities We Carry, Cities We See /
අපි රැගෙන යන නගර, අපි දකින නගර.

A city is never only stone, glass and steel. It is memory, worn soft by footsteps, a longing, carried quietly by those who walk it every day. It has long been a muse and mirror to artists and poets, to flâneurs walking without a destination, carrying nothing but an appetite to notice.

While Faiz found in it an ache that mirrored his own, Shemza and Zahoor ul Akhlaq folded the geometry of the street into their canvases. Sadequain let the city become both patron and subject, its din, clamour and everyday struggle finding their way into his paintings. For Zarina Hashmi, the city was distance itself, a longing carved into wood and cartographed onto paper.

This exhibition gathers such acts of witnessing. It is an archive, but an unwritten one; not filed or fixed in permanent record, but held instead in brushstrokes, in fragments, in musings about places that shaped them, as well as in profound cultural encounters and their manifestations engendered by shared material languages spoken across south Asian geographies. Each work here is a page torn from a book the city never wrote down itself, every offering salvaged by hands sensitive enough to notice.

Like any metropolis, Karachi is amorphous and shifting, remaking itself before any single account can claim it. Each artist featured in this exhibition arrived carrying a city of their own, with its streets, its language, and its light. It is this meeting of one city held in the body and another unfolding in real time that has shaped what they made. Like Karachi, these artists were never stationary: walking, watching, sometimes a step ahead of the city’s changes, sometimes trailing behind, but always paying attention.

What is on display is not a record of what Karachi was, but proof that someone – however new to it – was here and was paying attention

Umer Sheikh
Writer in Residence

Taaza Tareen 18, 2026