The importance of staying quiet
In 2014, The importance of staying quiet was exhibited in Hong Kong as an attempt to acknowledge a minimal vocabulary within Pakistani art. Conceived by Saira Ansari and Umer Butt, the presentation brought together works spanning six decades, between the 1950s and 2010s, and included Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–1985), Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941–1999), Lala Rukh (1948–2017), Rashid Rana (b. 1968), Hamra Abbas (b. 1976), Sara Salman (b. 1978), Ali Kazim (b. 1979), Ayesha Jatoi (b. 1979), Fahd Burki (b. 1981), and Iqra Tanveer (b. 1983).
Rather than showing signature works often associated with these artists – most of whom are not minimalists – the exhibition highlighted moments where they pared form and image down to their most distilled elements. The proposition was that minimal vocabularies in Pakistan are not anomalies or exceptions, but part of a more layered understanding of artistic abstraction in the region.
A decade later, The importance of staying quiet returns as a year-long dialogic exchange between Butt and Ansari and will include a series of presentations shaped through discursive encounters. This time, the programme will examine the development of practices that have deliberately engaged minimal or abstract strategies. This exercise is not only about tracing a lineage of abstraction, but about sustaining a way of looking that requires deeper reading and slower appreciation.
2. Lala Rukh II
November 16 - January 17, 2026
The second exhibition of The importance of staying quiet completes the two-part observational inquiry into Lala Rukh’s photographic practice.
Lala Rukh I presented a selection of photographs from the artist’s archives during her years at the University of Chicago (1974-76). Its speculative framework helped us to stage the evolution of Lala’s photographic sensibility, as she refined her sense of composition, framing, and perception.
For Lala Rukh II, we wanted to see how this inquiry could be extended to works from the late-1970s onward, showing how her practice moved toward abstraction. The exhibition builds parallels across different bodies of work, tracing how Lala both used and broke down photographic technique, the visual, and the conceptual into photo-documentation, unique photo works, video, and drawing.
Lala often returned to the idea of the coastal sites long after she photographed them, and past impressions resurfaced to find new form. These revisitations were less about replication than the remembering of a moment. This retinal memory, gathered through decades of looking, re-emerges in many works, and is catalogued painstakingly in a labyrinthine system of numbering and labelling that only she could fully decode.
The shift between still and moving image, print, and drawings mirrors her exploration of how light, memory, and duration register differently through material – all elements she refined through her photographic practice.
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Note:
This exhibition is accompanied by a series of standalone notes positioned throughout the space. These concise annotations offer focused observations that expand on the materials, processes, and ideas informing this authored framework.
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About the artist
Lala Rukh (b.1948, Lahore; d. 2017, Lahore / Lived and worked in Lahore, Pakistan) studied art at Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan (MFA) and University of Chicago, USA (MFA). She taught for 30 years at Punjab University, Department of Fine Art and the National College of Arts where she set up the MA(Hons) Visual Art Program in the year 2000. After retiring from teaching, Lala Rukh devoted her time in her studio in Lahore and to activism. She was amongst the foremost feminist activist artists of South Asia.
A selection of exhibitions includes: Göteborg International Biennial For Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden / In Our Own Backyard, Asia Art Archive, Hongkong / Lala Rukh: In the Round, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE / After Rain, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia / Notations on Time, Ishara Art Foundation, UAE / Line, beats and shadows, Kiran Nadar Museum Art, India / Luogo e Segni, Punta della Dogana, Italy / Artist’s Rooms: Lala Rukh, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE / Peindre La Nuit, Centre Pompidou – Metz, France / Documenta 14, Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany / For an Image, Faster Than Light – Curated by Bose Krishnamachari, Yinchuan Biennial, Yinchuan, China / The past, the present, the possible – Curated by Eungie Joo, Sharjah Biennial 12, Sharjah, UAE.