Painting history out of time, with images left behind by historians of power

The Canvas Gallery is hosting an art exhibition featuring works by Ahmed Ali Manganhar. Titled ‘Taxila Revisited’, the show is running at the gallery until July 14.

“My visit to Taxila began because I wanted to step outside of the studio, and thought of finding a quiet place outdoors where I could make studies from nature,” the catalogue issued by the gallery quotes the artist as saying.

“I considered going to Mohenjo-daro for winter, inspired by the works of Jamil Naqsh, who had done his last series of paintings in London titled ‘My Mohenjo-daro’.

“However, Taxila was closer to where I lived, and I had a friend there, anthropologist Dr Nadeem Omar Tarar, who was working on Gandhara and had a work space he could share, called the Centre for Culture and Development.

“I spent two weeks with him going around Buddhist sites. I visited the colonial museum, and worked with photographs from British archives. But photographs are staged, and dead pictures did not work for me.

“So I reworked them out of time, and set them in the landscape of wintry Taxila, the deliberations of British archaeologists being addressed by Alexander on his charging horse, among monks and statues from other times.

“To me history painting is not about facts, ideas or even interpretation. It could be about the many images that historians of power have left behind.

“What did British archaeologist tell us by the excavation and its display in the museum? Did they see this place only as prehistory, a stagnant place important for its ruins? Or were they looking at their own image, like the Greek myth of Narcissus, uncovering the Greek roots

to Gandharan Buddhist art?”

Manganhar is a visual practitioner currently residing in Lahore. Originally from Tando Allahyar, the artist graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore, majoring in painting (1997). Inspired by the billboard painters of his youth, his work addresses themes of memory, loss, culture and history.

He has exhibited in multiple national and international exhibitions in his career, including a four-person show at the Canvas Gallery in 2019, a solo exhibition at the Canvas Gallery in 2015, and a group show curated by Quddus Mirza in Mumbai in 2011.

He also displayed his works at the Abbot Hall Gallery & Museum, London, in 2011.