12/08/2026
Glimpses from the launch of Siddiqua Bilgrami’s new monograph, accompanied by a solo exhibition of her paintings at Chawkandi Art Gallery.
The event brought Bilgrami into a lively conversation with Sabiha Imani, who designed the publication, writer Nusrat Khawaja, and artist Meher Afroz, whose contributions to the monograph further illuminate Bilgrami’s artistic practice and legacy.
As Bilgrami herself writes, “There are some things, as everyone knows, that cannot be expressed on canvas, hence words are required to explain them. With me, poetry came in handy.”
Born in Hyderabad Deccan and raised within a family distinguished by its literary and educational traditions, Bilgrami continued her artistic training in Rome on an Italian Government scholarship. At the Scuola di Belle Arti, she studied under the painter Guido La Regina, developing an experimental approach to painting that included her distinctive technique of applying paint from a distance—an expressive gesture that would become integral to her abstract practice.
Having exhibited extensively across Pakistan, India, Italy, Switzerland, Kenya, France, England, and Canada, including representing Pakistan at the Commonwealth Art Exhibition in England, Bilgrami’s current exhibition marks her first solo presentation in Karachi in twenty-seven years. Bringing together painting and poetry, the exhibition offers an opportunity to revisit a practice grounded in experimentation, and the interplay between the visual and the written word.
The show continues through Thursday, 13 August 2026.
