This exhibition proves that bigger isn’t better when it comes to art

A woman, arms folded, commands the centre of a painting. She stands, eyes fixed on a horizon, against a sea of pale green. On either side of her, two orbs hover, rendered lovingly in gold leaf. She seems suspended between past and future. She doesn’t so much abandon one world for another as she holds both in perfect symmetry. They exist for her at once.

Descriptions of past II, a small painting by Nusra Latif Qureshi, adorns a wall in the first room of Birds in Far Pavilions, the artist’s first major monographic exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. According to the label, the work was made in 2001 when the artist migrated to Melbourne from Lahore. It’s tempting to understand this literally, as if the subject, who wears a pink salwar kameez, is torn in half. Pulled two ways. Bisected, divided, hyphenated, or any other hackneyed term we usually reserve for the migrant experience. But there’s a quiet defiance about this woman, who wears an unflinching expression. She’s less interested in submitting to a viewer’s perspective than she is in defining her own.

Artist Nusra Latif Qureshi.Credit: Jenni Carter

Versions of this woman recur throughout Birds in Far Pavilions. When I visit the show, I’m instantly drawn to them. They stand and crouch and sit, reclining on bolsters. They appear in gardens, in circles and strange, egg-shaped voids. In the third room, I’m taken by Gardens of desire II (2022), in which the figure, who now recalls the goddess Radha, appears naked. She embraces her lover, Krishna, who is imagined here as an absence in orange silhouette.

Nearby, Justified behavioural sketch (2002) sees the same woman sitting on a tasselled platform. Above her, the outline of a group of men who are playing polo: a game conceived in ancient Persia, championed by India’s Mughal and Rajput courtiers, then claimed by the British during the colonial era. She looks down, as if lost in a daydream, and it’s as if I’ve stumbled on a moment both rare and fleeting, glimpsing the depth of her interior world.

Nusra Latif Qureshi’s “Descriptions of past II” (2001).Credit:

Qureshi, who studied at the National College of the Arts in Lahore, was among the first women of her generation to study musavari – an intricate form that originated in Persia and flourished in the Mughal courts of India in the 16th century. It demands a meticulous and refined technique – artists were known to compose work with a single squirrel hair. That the tradition, as Qureshi, herself, has pointed out, is often referred to as “miniature painting” reflects a narrow colonial logic. It attributes the power of an image, its ability to hold an entire emotional hemisphere, to its visual real estate. In a world shaped by shouting oligarchs, we’ve been conditioned to believe that bigger is better. Birds in Far Pavilions, which features more than 100 works and spans three decades of Qureshi’s career, places different demands on our attention. It rewards repeat viewing. It encourages us to look and then look again.

Nusra Latif Qureshi’s “Medusa’s respite room” (2017).Credit:

In the first room, a series of watercolour-and-ink works from 1994, made when Qureshi was a student, chronicle seismic shifts in history – starting from Partition, the 1947 rupture that split India and Pakistan following Britain’s exit, unleashing waves of violence and trauma that still reverberate.

The works, which intertwine contemporary scenes with motifs from epic poems, reference the quanat, textile panels that once divided the public and private. To make the Museum of lost memories (2024), a newly commissioned installation, Qureshi assembles objects from her home and studio – a typewriter, a turban ornament – alongside colonial-era photographs, statues of gods and deities, from the gallery’s collection. In the process, she challenges the value we attribute to history, and argues for the truth and importance of personal experience.

Western painting so often revolves around linear perspective, fixing subjects in the foreground and background of a painting in space and time. But in Qureshi’s work, past and present converge within a single frame. A centuries-old visual language, associated with the realms of the courtly and masculine, can be remade to reflect narratives that are quieter but no less significant.

There’s a suite of works, in the final room, called Desires of memory 1-8 (2012), in which the artist has turned to photographs from her family albums: boys with arms around each other, a man wearing a Nehru suit, a woman smiling broadly at the camera. They are evoked elegantly, via the sparest of lines and superimposed over images of plants and flowers, a nod to the Mughal emperor Jehingar’s obsession with chronicling nature. As I leave the show, I pause in front of Did you come here to find history (2009). The installation, initially created for the Venice Biennale, splices the artist’s passport photos with portraits of Mughal kings, history an endless cycle, less static record and more living, breathing material that, under the force of our gaze, transforms.

Nusra Latif Qureshi: Birds in Far Pavilions is at the Art Gallery of NSW until June 15.