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.
5. Fahd Burki II.b
May 16 – July 31, 2026
The penultimate exhibition in The importance of staying quiet draws to a close a multi-part dialogue about spatiality and abstraction in the practice of Fahd Burki. The forms in ‘Fahd Burki II.b’ have now fully escaped their wall-bound surfaces and shapeshifted into the three-dimensional.
Six wooden configurations meet us, some solid, others disguised as a single-piece unit, but in fact composed of conjoining parts. The works are not immediately recognisable or particularly organic: Seed may be an obvious exception, both by name and shape, while Hearth reveals as decidedly corporeal, its three parts locked together in a tight embrace. Non-erotic, still sensual, not necessarily human. Aero could be a tail fin or a rudder of a flying object, but it feels equally like an elongated teepee. Either representation, from colliding worlds, is a possible visitor from earlier drawings by the artist.
The wood gradients change tonality, from the warm heaviness of the cedar to the cooler lightness of the beech. Varying thicknesses of white gesso appear on some forms, draping one work lightly like gauze and another thickly like limewash. Thinner yet are the optically illusionary pale blue lines that run down the multiple frames of Gate as it spans out like collapsed architecture. Above them all towers the serpentine totem, Old Bone, watching. From one angle Old Bone faces Kiva (as it did in the Lahore presentation), and from another, it stands in front of it. No one side is correct, as is no one meaning. But it allows two simultaneous truths to exist at the same time.
All the sculptures in the show were originally created for a solo presentation in Lahore for an exhibition programme that runs out of repurposed post-war barracks. The low ceilings, curved white walls, and independent rooms of that space dictated the development of the works and the tension between them.
Shown together here for the first time, this presentation looks at the physicality of the indeterminate forms that populate the artist’s works on paper and canvas. Geometrically abstract and stripped of representation, the visuals emerge from two-decades of a studio-based practice gripped with the turn of material, surface, colour, and light.
Part of the many discussions we’ve had about exhibiting the sculptures is what it means to plan spatially, and to rethink the works beyond their first staging. There is a heightened awareness that the lines, forms, and voids of this space, and the area around the objects, become an invisible extension of the work itself.
The layout of the gallery often imposes its length as a nave, with the final wall becoming an altar of sorts. Do we play with this, against this, or pretend it doesn’t exist as a question at all? Many things happen in this show that may not be obvious at first, or even at all. Bastion, for instance is a ghost of the past exhibition warming the room for its companions.
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The importance of staying quiet will conclude in September 2026 with its sixth and final exhibition ‘6. Group Show’. The presentation will bring in a selection of artists from Pakistan, and its diaspora, including those not represented by Grey Noise.
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About the artist
Fahd Burki (b. 1981, Lahore, Pakistan / Lives and works in Pakistan) graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore and received a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Selected exhibitions : Old Bone, THE BARRACKS Art Museum, Lahore, Pakistan / daydreams, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE, / Wheredoiendandyoubegin - On Secularity, 9th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art Gothenberg, Sweden / Folds of Belonging, Brisbane / Social Calligraphies, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland / 11th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea / The Missing One, OCA, Oslo, Norway / Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh / Carré d’Art - musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, Nîmes, France.